etc.; classes which have means of determining the effects of education
on individuals equal in their natural abilities that other classes do
not possess.

[39] Late Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Reference
is here especially made to his Fifth Annual Report, bearing date January
1, 1842, from which, with his consent, what follows under this head has
been substantially drawn.

A farmer hiring a laborer for one season who has received a good common
school education, and the ensuing season hiring another who has not
enjoyed this advantage, although he may be personally convinced of the
relative value or profitableness of their services, yet he will rarely
have any exact data or tests to refer to by which he can measure the
superiority of the former over the latter. They do not work side by
side, so that he can institute a comparison between the amounts of labor
they perform. They may cultivate different fields, where the ease of
tillage or the fertility of the soils may be different. They may rear
crops under the influence of different seasons, so that he can not
discriminate between what is referable to the bounty of nature and what
to superiority in judgment or skill.

Similar difficulties exist in estimating the amount and value of female
labor in the household. And as to the mechanic also--the carpenter, the
mason, the blacksmith, the tool-maker of any kind--there are a thousand
circumstances, which we call accidental, that mingle their influence in
giving quality and durability to their work, and prevent us from making
a precise estimate of the relative value of any two men's handicraft.
Individual differences, too, in regard to a single article or a single
days' work, may be too minute to be noticed or appreciated, while the
aggregate of these differences at the end of a few years may make all
the difference between a poor man and a rich one. No observing man can
have failed to notice the difference between two workmen, one of whom,
to use a proverbial expression, always "hits the nail on the head,"
while the other loses half his strength and destroys half his nails by
the awkwardness of his blows; but perhaps few men have thought of the
difference in the results of two such men's labor at the end of twenty
years.

But when hundreds of men or women work side by side in the same factory,
at the same machinery, in making the same fabrics, and, by a fixed rule
of the establishment, lab