occupations. Organized labor, ever
running ahead of legislation in its standards of hours and sanitary
conditions, provides a school of education and experiment for the
whole community, by procuring for trade unionists working conditions
which afterwards serve as the model for enlightened employers, and as
a standard that the community in the end must exact for the whole body
of workers.

But more must be done than merely keeping our people alive, by
insisting they shall not be killed in the earning of their bread.
Leaders of thought and many captains of industry have at last grasped
the fact that the worker, uneducated and not trained in any true
sense, is at once a poor tool and a most costly one. Other countries
add their quota of experience, to back up public opinion and
legislative action. Hence the demand heard from one end of the land
to the other for industrial training. The public everywhere after a
century of modern factory industry are at length beginning to have
some definite ideas regarding industrial training for boys who are to
supply the human element in the factory scheme. (Regarding girls, they
still grope in outer darkness.)

For many years economists were accustomed to express nothing but
satisfaction over the ever-advancing specialization of industry. They
saw only the cheapening of the product, the vast increase in the total
amount produced, and the piling up of profits, and they beheld in all
three results nothing but social advantage. Verily both manufacturer
and consumer were benefited. When the more thoughtful turned their
attention to the actual makers through whose labors the cloth and
the shoes and the pins of specialized industry were produced, they
satisfied themselves that the worker must also be a sharer in the
benefits of the new system; for, said they, everyone who is a worker
is also a consumer. Even though the worker who is making shoes has
to turn out twenty times as much work for the same wages, still as
a consumer he shares in the all-round cheapening of manufactured
articles, and is able to buy clothes and shoes and pins so much the
cheaper. That the cost of living on the whole might be greater, that
the wage of the worker might be too low to permit of his purchasing
the very articles into the making of which his own labor had gone, did
not occur to these _a priori_ reasoners. It has taken a whole century
of incredibly swift mechanical advance, associated at the same time
wit