and no less far—­reaching is the effect of a good building or mechanical trades school, a textile, or watch-making, or engraving school.  All such training must develop not only manual dexterity but industrial intelligence.  In international rivalry this country does not have to fear the competition of pauper labor as much as it has to fear the educated labor of specially trained competitors; and we should have the education of the hand, eye, and brain which will fit us to meet such competition.

In every possible way we should help the wageworker who toils with his hands and who must (we hope in a constantly increasing measure) also toil with his brain.  Under the Constitution the National Legislature can do but little of direct importance for his welfare save where he is engaged in work which permits it to act under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution; and this is one reason why I so earnestly hope that both the legislative and judicial branches of the Government will construe this clause of the Constitution in the broadest possible manner.  We can, however, in such a matter as industrial training, in such a matter as child labor and factory laws, set an example to the States by enacting the most advanced legislation that can wisely be enacted for the District of Columbia.

The only other persons whose welfare is as vital to the welfare of the whole country as is the welfare of the wageworkers are the tillers of the soil, the farmers.  It is a mere truism to say that no growth of cities, no growth of wealth, no industrial development can atone for any falling off in the character and standing of the farming population.  During the last few decades this fact has been recognized with ever-increasing clearness.  There is no longer any failure to realize that farming, at least in certain branches, must become a technical and scientific profession.  This means that there must be open to farmers the chance for technical and scientific training, not theoretical merely but of the most severely practical type.  The farmer represents a peculiarly high type of American citizenship, and he must have the same chance to rise and develop as other American citizens have.  Moreover, it is exactly as true of the farmer, as it is of the business man and the wageworker, that the ultimate success of the Nation of which he forms a part must be founded not alone on material prosperity but upon high moral, mental, and physical development.  This education of the farmer—­self-education by preference but also education from the outside, as with all other men—­is peculiarly necessary here in the United States, where the frontier conditions even in the newest States have now nearly vanished, where there must be a substitution of a more intensive system of cultivation for the old wasteful farm management, and where there must be a better business organization among the farmers themselves.