hing_; we are doing them
a wrong so demonstrable and so grievous that it cannot continue.

The schools which give a direct preparation for industrial life are
growing fast.

In the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, in New York City, many
hundreds of young girls are, in each year, enrolled. These girls
have completed the first five public-school grades. They are
learning now to be workers in paste and glue for such occupations
as sample-mounting and candle-shade-making, to be workers with
brush and pencil for such occupations as photograph-retouching and
costume-sketching, to be milliners, to be dressmakers, to be
operators of electric-power sewing-machines.

"Nothing to it," says an irritated manufacturer. "Nothing to it at
all. I can't get any good help any more. Back to the old days! Those
early New Englanders who made the business of this country what it is,
they didn't have all this technical business. They didn't study in
trade schools."

My dear sir, those early New Englanders not only studied in trade
schools, but worked and played and slept in trade schools. They spent
their whole lives in trade schools, from the moment when they began to
crawl on the floor among their mothers' looms and spinning-wheels.
There were few homes in early New England that didn't offer large
numbers of technical courses in which the father and the mother were
always teaching by doing and the sons and the daughters were always
learning by imitating.

The facts about this are so simple and so familiar that we don't stop
to think of their meaning.

When in the spring the wood ashes from the winter fires were poured
into the lye barrel, and water was poured in with them, and the lye
began to trickle out from the bottom of the barrel, and the winter's
savings of grease were brought out, and the grease and the lye were
boiled together in the big kettle, and mother had finished making the
family's supply of soap for another year, the children had taken not
only a little lesson in industriousness, by helping to make the soap,
but a little lesson in industry, too, by observing the technique and
organization of the soap business from start to finish. A boy from
that family, even if he never learned to read or write the word
"soap," might some day have some _ideas_ about soap.

The curriculum of an old New England home, so far as presided over by
the wife, may be incompletely suggested as follows:

(N. B. The reader will note the inap