cholars, at the
hands of the national teachers.

The primary schools of great industrial towns, such as Fall River, the
Manchester of America, are filled, to quite as great an extent as similar
schools in Europe, with ignorant, ragged, and bare-footed urchins. These
children are, indeed, no less well cared for and taught than their Yankee
fellows, and one cannot sufficiently admire the energy and enthusiasm with
which school-teachers generally endeavor to "make Americans" of their
stolid and ragged little alien charges. In these cases, however, where
often the children have had no schooling at all before they are old enough
to work, it is quite clear that the school cannot do all that is required
to raise the labor of to-day up to the levels it occupied in the past.
And, if the school itself is ineffective in this regard, how much more so
must be the Church, to which immigrant youth is a comparative stranger; or
those democratic institutions which are based, to quote the words of
Washington himself, upon "the virtue and intelligence of the people."

Whether the present condition of labor in America will ever again be
lifted to the levels of the past depends, in truth, less upon the State,
the Church, and the School, than upon the part which the American employer
is taking or about to take in this question. It is impossible for any
unprejudiced observer to be long in the States, and especially in the New
England States, without coming to the conclusion that a large number of
employers are very anxious about the character of the labor they employ,
and willing to assist to the utmost of their power in improving it. In
spite of the love of money and luxury which is so conspicuous a feature of
certain sections of American society, a high ideal of the proper function
of wealth has arisen in the States, where large fortunes are chiefly
things of recent date, among large and influential classes having an
enlightened regard for the best welfare of the country. This regard finds
expression now in the establishment of a factory, managed with one eye on
profits and another on the elevation of the artisan, and now in the
endowment of free libraries or similar institutions, offering
opportunities of improvement to all.

To give only a few instances of the former movement: Mr. Pullman, the
great car-builder, has recently established, on Lake Calumet, a vast
system of workshops and workmen's homes, a description of which reads like
a