hase of want and misery, born of ignorance first, and then
of the essential conditions of competition, under-pay, and over-work, as
one great hope for the future. The instant demand, if it is to become
possible, is for an education sufficiently technical to give each member
of society the hand-skill necessary to make a fair livelihood. Such
knowledge is impossible without perfectly equipped industrial schools;
and the need of these has so demonstrated itself that further argument
for their adoption is hardly necessary. The constant advance in
invention and the fact that the worker, unless exceptionally skilled, is
more and more the servant of machinery, is an appeal no less powerful in
the same direction. Twenty years ago one of the wisest thinkers in
France, conservative, yet with the clearest sense of what the future
must bring for all workers, wrote:--

"From the economic point of view, woman, who has next to no
material force and whose arms are advantageously replaced by the
least machine, can have useful place and obtain fair remuneration
only by the development of the best qualities of her intelligence.
It is the inexorable law of our civilization--the principle and
formula even of social progress, that _mechanical engines are to
accomplish every operation of human labor which does not proceed
directly from the mind_. The hand of man is each day deprived of a
portion of its original task, but this general gain is a loss for
the particular, and for the classes whose only instrument of labor
and of earning daily bread is a pair of feeble arms."

The machine, the synonym for production at large, has refined and
subtilized--even spiritualized itself to a degree almost inconceivable,
nor is there any doubt but that the future has far greater surprises in
store. But if metal has come to wellnigh its utmost power of service,
the worker's capacity has had no equality of development, and the story
of labor to-day for the whole working world is one of degradation. That
men are becoming alive to this; that students of political economy
solemnly warn the producer what responsibility is his; and that the
certainty of some instant step as vital and inevitable is plain,--are
gleams of light in this murky and sombre sky, from which it would seem
at times only the thunderbolt could be certain.

Organization and its result in industrial co-operation is one goal, but
even