h the most blind, cruel, and brutal waste of child life and adult
life, to arrive at the beginning of an adjustment between the demands
of machine-driven industry and the needs and the just claims of the
human workers. We have only just recovered from the dazed sense of
wonderment and pride of achievement into which modern discoveries
and inventions, with the resultant enormous increase of commerce
and material wealth, plunged the whole civilized world. We are but
beginning to realize, what we had well-nigh totally overlooked, that
even machine-driven industry with all that it connotes, enormously
increased production of manufactured goods, and the spread of physical
comfort to a degree unknown before among great numbers, is not the
whole of national well-being; that by itself, unbalanced by justice to
the workers, it is not even an unmixed boon.

I have tried to follow up the evolution of our present industrial
society on several parallel lines: how industry itself has developed,
how immigration affects the labor problem as regards the woman worker,
and the relation of women to the vocations in the modern world. Let us
now glance at our educational systems and see how they fit in to the
needs of the workers, especially of the working-women. For our present
purpose I will not touch on education as we find it in our most
backward states, but rather as it is in the most advanced, since it
is from improvement in these that we may expect to produce the best
results for the whole nation.

Free and compulsory public education was established to supply
literary and cultural training at a time when children still enjoyed
opportunities of learning in the home, and later in small shops
something of the trades they were to practice when grown-up. I know
of a master plumber, who twenty years ago, as a child of eleven, made
friends with the blacksmith and the tinsmith in the little village
where he lived, and taught himself the elements of his trade at the
blacksmith's anvil and with the tinsmith's tools. At fourteen that boy
knew practically a great deal about the properties of metals, could
handle simple tools deftly, and was well prepared to learn his trade
readily when the time came.

As the most intelligent city parents cannot as individuals furnish
their children with similar chances today, we must look to the public
schools, which all citizens alike support, to take up the matter, and
supply methodically and deliberately,