hen we face them,--ignorant, blind, stupid, incompetent in every
fibre,--and yet no count of such indictment alters our responsibility
toward them. Rather it multiplies it in always increasing ratio. For it
is our own system that has made these lives worthless, and sooner or
later we must answer how it came, that living in a civilized land they
had less chance than the heathen to whom we send our missionaries, and
upon whose occasional conversions we plume ourselves as if thus the
Kingdom of Heaven were made wider. If it is true that for many only a
little alleviation is possible, a little more justice, a little better
apportionment of such good as they can comprehend, it is also true that
something better is within the reach of all.

How then shall we define it, and what possibility of alteration for
either lives or conditions lies before us? Nothing that can be of
instant growth; and here lies the chief discouragement, since as a
people we demand instantaneousness, and would have seed, flower, and
fruit at the same moment. Admit patience, capacity to wait, and to work
while waiting, as the first term of the equation, and the rest arrange
themselves.

For the greater part of social reformers, co-operation has stood as the
initial and most essential step, as the fruit that could be plucked
full-grown; and experience in England would seem to have demonstrated
the belief as true. It is the American inability to wait that has proved
it untrue for us, and until very lately made failure our only record;
but there is a deeper reason than a merely temperamental one. The
abolition of the apprentice system, brought about by the greed of master
and men alike, has abolished training and slow, steady preparation for
any trade. An American has been regarded as quick enough and keen enough
to take in the essential features of a calling, as it were, at a glance,
and apprenticeship has been taken as practically an insult to national
intelligence. Law has kept pace with such conviction, and thus the door
has been shut in the face of all learners, and foreigners have supplied
our skilled workmen and work-women. The groundwork of any better order
lies, if not in a return to the apprentice system, then in a training
from the beginning, which will give to eye and hand the utmost power of
which they are capable. Industrial education is the foundation, and
until it has in its broadest and deepest sense become the portion of
every child born