s of dollars paid in a year to the building trades in
this city barely six millions are grudgingly accorded the native worker.
There is no decree to exclude the mechanic from abroad. He may come and
go--and go he does, in shoals, to his home across the sea at the end of
each season, with its profits--under the scheme of international
comradeship that excludes only the American workman and his boy. I have
talked with some of the most intelligent of the labor leaders, men well
known all over the land, to find out if there were any defence to be made
for this that I was not aware of, but have got nothing but evasion and
sophistries about the "protection of labor" for my answer. A protection,
indeed, that has nearly resulted already in the practical extinction of
the American mechanic, the best and cleverest in the world, in America's
chief city, at the bidding of the Walking Delegate.

[Illustration: THE PLUMBING SHOP IN THE NEW YORK TRADE SCHOOLS.]

Even to Colonel Auchmuty's Industrial School this persecution has been
extended in a persistent attempt for years to taboo its graduates. In
spite of it, the New York Trade Schools open their twelfth season this
winter with six hundred scholars and more, in place of the thirty who sat
in the first class eleven years ago. The community's better sense is
coming to the rescue, and the opposition to the school is wearing off. In
the spring as many hundred young plasterers, printers, tailors, plumbers,
stone-cutters, bricklayers, carpenters, and blacksmiths will go forth
capable mechanics, and with their self-respect unimpaired by the
associations of the shop and the saloon under the old apprentice system.
In this one respect the trades union may have done them a service it did
not intend. Colonel Auchmuty's school has demonstrated what it amounts to
by furnishing from among its young men the bricklayers for more than as
many handsome buildings in New York as there were pupils in its first
class. When a committee of master builders came on from Philadelphia to
see what their work was like, the report it brought back was that it
looked as if the builders had put their hearts in it, and a trade-school
was forthwith established in that city. Of that, too, Colonel Auchmuty
paid the way from the start.

His wealth has kept the New York school above water since it was started;
but this winter a benevolent millionaire, Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, for whom
wealth has other and greater res