ory hand. The
overcrowding of the professions by poorly equipped men arises from much
the same source, and from the conviction that "an education" is wasted
if a boy goes into a factory or shop.

A Chicago manufacturer tells a story of twin boys, whom he befriended
and meant to give a start in life. He sent them both to the Athenaeum for
several winters as a preparatory business training, and then took them
into his office, where they speedily became known as the bright one and
the stupid one. The stupid one was finally dismissed after repeated
trials, when to the surprise of the entire establishment, he quickly
betook himself into the shops, where he became a wide-awake and valuable
workman. His chagrined benefactor, in telling the story, admits that he
himself had fallen a victim to his own business training and his early
notion of rising in life. In reality he had merely followed the lead of
most benevolent people who help poor boys. They test the success of
their efforts by the number whom they have taken out of factory work
into some other and "higher occupation."

Quite in line with this commercial ideal are the night schools and
institutions of learning most accessible to working people. First among
them is the business college which teaches largely the mechanism of
type-writing and book-keeping, and lays all stress upon commerce and
methods of distribution. Commodities are treated as exports and
imports, or solely in regard to their commercial value, and not, of
course, in relation to their historic development or the manufacturing
processes to which they have been subjected. These schools do not in the
least minister to the needs of the actual factory employee, who is in
the shop and not in the office. We assume that all men are searching for
"puddings and power," to use Carlyle's phrase, and furnish only the
schools which help them to those ends.

The business college man, or even the man who goes through an academic
course in order to prepare for a profession, comes to look on learning
too much as an investment from which he will later reap the benefits in
earning money. He does not connect learning with industrial pursuits,
nor does he in the least lighten or illuminate those pursuits for those
of his friends who have not risen in life. "It is as though nets were
laid at the entrance to education, in which those who by some means or
other escape from the masses bowed down by labor, are inevitably caught
a