[Contents]CHAPTER V.SKILL.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift. The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision. The young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as well as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in steering its way through the maze of a tangled forest.Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such accomplishments by long practice. Instead of driving them back to their nests, their parents encourage their attempts at longer and longer flights, and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow and sets her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens practice mouse-catching by playing with balls; puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels play at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A British naturalist, who had domesticated a young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam across the floor of his study. The little engineer[74]had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood, etc., and piled them up to best advantage, placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the interspaces with letters and journals. Every now and then he would “stand off” to scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to mend a misarrangement here and there.Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels, or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal American boy a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet copy of Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law which required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for three hours a day was probably the most popular statute of the British code. On new railroads, bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young rustics, who forego the pleasures of nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipulations of a new handicraft. Even in after years the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates have defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of tools and passing whole days in the retirement of an[75]amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I. invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and bird-traps. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter of his empire.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The English wordking, like Danishkongand GermanKönig, are derived fromkönnen(practical knowledge), and the first ruler was the most skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill, whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness, established the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many respects a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops. Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of self-reliance which wealth can only counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I once overheard a controversy on the comparative value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found clever advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in four different continents. “There’s a use for all that, no[76]doubt,” said he, “but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable as the library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is often only the outcome of such expertness, and in sudden emergencies theories are shamed by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the superiorconstructivenessof an army that could bridge a river while their opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turkish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention of the chain grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet[77]Goethe, whose intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical by-trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental as well as physical debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of Nature which no cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a school of practical wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the English language happily expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and mechanics far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth could dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best safeguard against the chief bane of wealth:ennui, with its temptations to folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his philanthropic life in practical landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators, and the benefits of his plan would extend to emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments afford only a dubious safeguard. “A mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques Rousseau, “is the best basis of safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical scholarship may go begging, where technical skill finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may recover his loss in the course of years; a skilful mechanic need only enter the next workshop and show[78]a sample of his handiwork. ‘Well, let’s see you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch in.’ ”Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against numberless perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by keeping him at home and guarding him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets that her apron-strings cannot guide him through the perils of after years; and a better plan was that of Cato, the statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in the midst of his manifold duties, found time to instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect tendency of thatcaste spiritwhich has for ages fostered the antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children of toil that aSudrawas not permitted to approach a priest without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast by[79]constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him? You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the sameRitterwho would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by[80]highway robbery. The princes of the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for secular concerns.That sort ofother-worldlinessstill seems to bias our plans of education. Colleges that would fear to lose prestige by devoting a few minutes a week to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens of hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical miracle-monger. Mechanical mastership (after all, the basis of all science) is denied a place among the honorable “faculties” of our high-schools. Fashionable parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of a boy who should visit joiner-shops and smithies, instead of following his aristocratic friends to the club-house. They would bewail the profanation of his social rank, if he should accept an invitation to impart his skill to the pupils of a mechanical training-school; but would connive at the mental prostitution of a young sneak who should try to reëstablish a sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers of a mythology-school.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Neglected development, either of physical or mental faculties, avenges itself inennui, modified, for the benefit of the poor, by the less monotonous[81]afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is a wholly abnormal condition, as unknown to the children of the wilderness, who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties, as to the truly civilized man, who finds means to satisfy that craving. Unemployed muscles, like idle talents, rebel against continued neglect and goad the sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of vice, and the father who thinks it a waste of money to invest a dollar in a tool-box may have to spend hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and gambling debts.Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were rather rare in the prime of the North American republic, when nearly every colonist was a farmer, and every farm apolytechnicumof home-taught trades; but European luxuries introduced European habits, and our cities now abound with plutocrats who are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers laid the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred the vices faster than the refinements of wealth, and have become acquainted withennui—We lack the word but have the thing;and thousands who would fail to find relief on the classical hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might imitate his landlord, who practiced sharp-shooting with a medieval hunting-bow till he could challenge the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison. In a choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is, indeed, clearly preferable to games of chance; but[82]to that last resort of inanity the traditional aversion to manual employments has actually driven thousands of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never sunk to the abject effeminacy of European cities, where physical apathy has become a test of good breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments a stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently, social prestige has to be purchased at the price of practical helplessness, of dependence in all mechanical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of hirelings.Life-endangering accident may now and then illustrate the disadvantages of physical incapacity; a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that the saving influence of a swimming-school might compare favorably with that of the baptismal miracle tank; but the survivors will persist in relying on the vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity avenges itself in every waking hour, even of the wealthiest weakling, while the guardian-spirit of Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to the playground and follows them over mountains and seas.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The growing impatience with the dead-language system of our monkish school-plan will soon lead to a radical reform of college education, and a fair portion of the time gained should be devoted to the culture of mechanical arts. For boys in their teens the “instinct of constructiveness” would still prove to retain enough of its native energy to make the change[83]a decidedly popular one, as demonstrated by the success of the mechanical training schools that have attracted many pupils who have to find the requisite leisure by stinting themselves in their recreations. “Applied gymnastics” (riding, swimming, etc.) would be still more popular, and greatly lessen the yearly list of accidents from the neglect of such training.The bias of fashion would soon be modified by the precedence of its leaders, as in Prussia, where the royal family set a good example by educating their princes (in addition to the inevitable military training) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplishment (carpentry, sculpture, bookbinding, etc.), the choice of handicraft being optional with the pupil. No model residence should be deemed complete without a polytechnic workshop, furnished with a panoply of apparatus for the practice of all sorts of amateur chemical and mechanical pursuits—a plan by which the Hungarian statesman-author, Maurus Jockar, has banished the specter ofennuifrom his hospitable country seat. His private hobby is Black Art, as he calls his experiments in recondite chemistry, but any one of his guests is welcome to try his hand at wood-carving, glass-painting, metallurgy, or any of the more primitive crafts, for which the laboratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus. Private taste might, of course, modify the details of that plan, and even without regard to eventual results, its proximate benefits if once known would alone insure its general adoption in the homes of theennui-stricken classes. The educational advantages[84]of mechanical training, though, can, indeed, hardly be overrated. A scholar with nerveless arms and undextrous hands is as far from being a complete man as a nimble savage with an undeveloped brain.[85]
[Contents]CHAPTER V.SKILL.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift. The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision. The young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as well as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in steering its way through the maze of a tangled forest.Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such accomplishments by long practice. Instead of driving them back to their nests, their parents encourage their attempts at longer and longer flights, and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow and sets her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens practice mouse-catching by playing with balls; puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels play at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A British naturalist, who had domesticated a young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam across the floor of his study. The little engineer[74]had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood, etc., and piled them up to best advantage, placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the interspaces with letters and journals. Every now and then he would “stand off” to scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to mend a misarrangement here and there.Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels, or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal American boy a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet copy of Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law which required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for three hours a day was probably the most popular statute of the British code. On new railroads, bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young rustics, who forego the pleasures of nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipulations of a new handicraft. Even in after years the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates have defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of tools and passing whole days in the retirement of an[75]amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I. invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and bird-traps. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter of his empire.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The English wordking, like Danishkongand GermanKönig, are derived fromkönnen(practical knowledge), and the first ruler was the most skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill, whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness, established the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many respects a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops. Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of self-reliance which wealth can only counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I once overheard a controversy on the comparative value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found clever advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in four different continents. “There’s a use for all that, no[76]doubt,” said he, “but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable as the library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is often only the outcome of such expertness, and in sudden emergencies theories are shamed by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the superiorconstructivenessof an army that could bridge a river while their opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turkish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention of the chain grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet[77]Goethe, whose intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical by-trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental as well as physical debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of Nature which no cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a school of practical wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the English language happily expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and mechanics far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth could dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best safeguard against the chief bane of wealth:ennui, with its temptations to folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his philanthropic life in practical landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators, and the benefits of his plan would extend to emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments afford only a dubious safeguard. “A mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques Rousseau, “is the best basis of safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical scholarship may go begging, where technical skill finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may recover his loss in the course of years; a skilful mechanic need only enter the next workshop and show[78]a sample of his handiwork. ‘Well, let’s see you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch in.’ ”Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against numberless perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by keeping him at home and guarding him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets that her apron-strings cannot guide him through the perils of after years; and a better plan was that of Cato, the statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in the midst of his manifold duties, found time to instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect tendency of thatcaste spiritwhich has for ages fostered the antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children of toil that aSudrawas not permitted to approach a priest without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast by[79]constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him? You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the sameRitterwho would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by[80]highway robbery. The princes of the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for secular concerns.That sort ofother-worldlinessstill seems to bias our plans of education. Colleges that would fear to lose prestige by devoting a few minutes a week to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens of hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical miracle-monger. Mechanical mastership (after all, the basis of all science) is denied a place among the honorable “faculties” of our high-schools. Fashionable parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of a boy who should visit joiner-shops and smithies, instead of following his aristocratic friends to the club-house. They would bewail the profanation of his social rank, if he should accept an invitation to impart his skill to the pupils of a mechanical training-school; but would connive at the mental prostitution of a young sneak who should try to reëstablish a sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers of a mythology-school.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Neglected development, either of physical or mental faculties, avenges itself inennui, modified, for the benefit of the poor, by the less monotonous[81]afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is a wholly abnormal condition, as unknown to the children of the wilderness, who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties, as to the truly civilized man, who finds means to satisfy that craving. Unemployed muscles, like idle talents, rebel against continued neglect and goad the sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of vice, and the father who thinks it a waste of money to invest a dollar in a tool-box may have to spend hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and gambling debts.Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were rather rare in the prime of the North American republic, when nearly every colonist was a farmer, and every farm apolytechnicumof home-taught trades; but European luxuries introduced European habits, and our cities now abound with plutocrats who are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers laid the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred the vices faster than the refinements of wealth, and have become acquainted withennui—We lack the word but have the thing;and thousands who would fail to find relief on the classical hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might imitate his landlord, who practiced sharp-shooting with a medieval hunting-bow till he could challenge the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison. In a choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is, indeed, clearly preferable to games of chance; but[82]to that last resort of inanity the traditional aversion to manual employments has actually driven thousands of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never sunk to the abject effeminacy of European cities, where physical apathy has become a test of good breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments a stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently, social prestige has to be purchased at the price of practical helplessness, of dependence in all mechanical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of hirelings.Life-endangering accident may now and then illustrate the disadvantages of physical incapacity; a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that the saving influence of a swimming-school might compare favorably with that of the baptismal miracle tank; but the survivors will persist in relying on the vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity avenges itself in every waking hour, even of the wealthiest weakling, while the guardian-spirit of Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to the playground and follows them over mountains and seas.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The growing impatience with the dead-language system of our monkish school-plan will soon lead to a radical reform of college education, and a fair portion of the time gained should be devoted to the culture of mechanical arts. For boys in their teens the “instinct of constructiveness” would still prove to retain enough of its native energy to make the change[83]a decidedly popular one, as demonstrated by the success of the mechanical training schools that have attracted many pupils who have to find the requisite leisure by stinting themselves in their recreations. “Applied gymnastics” (riding, swimming, etc.) would be still more popular, and greatly lessen the yearly list of accidents from the neglect of such training.The bias of fashion would soon be modified by the precedence of its leaders, as in Prussia, where the royal family set a good example by educating their princes (in addition to the inevitable military training) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplishment (carpentry, sculpture, bookbinding, etc.), the choice of handicraft being optional with the pupil. No model residence should be deemed complete without a polytechnic workshop, furnished with a panoply of apparatus for the practice of all sorts of amateur chemical and mechanical pursuits—a plan by which the Hungarian statesman-author, Maurus Jockar, has banished the specter ofennuifrom his hospitable country seat. His private hobby is Black Art, as he calls his experiments in recondite chemistry, but any one of his guests is welcome to try his hand at wood-carving, glass-painting, metallurgy, or any of the more primitive crafts, for which the laboratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus. Private taste might, of course, modify the details of that plan, and even without regard to eventual results, its proximate benefits if once known would alone insure its general adoption in the homes of theennui-stricken classes. The educational advantages[84]of mechanical training, though, can, indeed, hardly be overrated. A scholar with nerveless arms and undextrous hands is as far from being a complete man as a nimble savage with an undeveloped brain.[85]
[Contents]CHAPTER V.SKILL.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift. The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision. The young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as well as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in steering its way through the maze of a tangled forest.Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such accomplishments by long practice. Instead of driving them back to their nests, their parents encourage their attempts at longer and longer flights, and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow and sets her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens practice mouse-catching by playing with balls; puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels play at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A British naturalist, who had domesticated a young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam across the floor of his study. The little engineer[74]had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood, etc., and piled them up to best advantage, placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the interspaces with letters and journals. Every now and then he would “stand off” to scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to mend a misarrangement here and there.Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels, or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal American boy a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet copy of Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law which required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for three hours a day was probably the most popular statute of the British code. On new railroads, bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young rustics, who forego the pleasures of nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipulations of a new handicraft. Even in after years the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates have defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of tools and passing whole days in the retirement of an[75]amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I. invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and bird-traps. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter of his empire.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The English wordking, like Danishkongand GermanKönig, are derived fromkönnen(practical knowledge), and the first ruler was the most skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill, whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness, established the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many respects a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops. Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of self-reliance which wealth can only counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I once overheard a controversy on the comparative value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found clever advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in four different continents. “There’s a use for all that, no[76]doubt,” said he, “but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable as the library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is often only the outcome of such expertness, and in sudden emergencies theories are shamed by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the superiorconstructivenessof an army that could bridge a river while their opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turkish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention of the chain grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet[77]Goethe, whose intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical by-trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental as well as physical debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of Nature which no cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a school of practical wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the English language happily expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and mechanics far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth could dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best safeguard against the chief bane of wealth:ennui, with its temptations to folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his philanthropic life in practical landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators, and the benefits of his plan would extend to emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments afford only a dubious safeguard. “A mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques Rousseau, “is the best basis of safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical scholarship may go begging, where technical skill finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may recover his loss in the course of years; a skilful mechanic need only enter the next workshop and show[78]a sample of his handiwork. ‘Well, let’s see you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch in.’ ”Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against numberless perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by keeping him at home and guarding him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets that her apron-strings cannot guide him through the perils of after years; and a better plan was that of Cato, the statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in the midst of his manifold duties, found time to instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect tendency of thatcaste spiritwhich has for ages fostered the antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children of toil that aSudrawas not permitted to approach a priest without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast by[79]constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him? You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the sameRitterwho would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by[80]highway robbery. The princes of the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for secular concerns.That sort ofother-worldlinessstill seems to bias our plans of education. Colleges that would fear to lose prestige by devoting a few minutes a week to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens of hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical miracle-monger. Mechanical mastership (after all, the basis of all science) is denied a place among the honorable “faculties” of our high-schools. Fashionable parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of a boy who should visit joiner-shops and smithies, instead of following his aristocratic friends to the club-house. They would bewail the profanation of his social rank, if he should accept an invitation to impart his skill to the pupils of a mechanical training-school; but would connive at the mental prostitution of a young sneak who should try to reëstablish a sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers of a mythology-school.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Neglected development, either of physical or mental faculties, avenges itself inennui, modified, for the benefit of the poor, by the less monotonous[81]afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is a wholly abnormal condition, as unknown to the children of the wilderness, who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties, as to the truly civilized man, who finds means to satisfy that craving. Unemployed muscles, like idle talents, rebel against continued neglect and goad the sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of vice, and the father who thinks it a waste of money to invest a dollar in a tool-box may have to spend hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and gambling debts.Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were rather rare in the prime of the North American republic, when nearly every colonist was a farmer, and every farm apolytechnicumof home-taught trades; but European luxuries introduced European habits, and our cities now abound with plutocrats who are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers laid the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred the vices faster than the refinements of wealth, and have become acquainted withennui—We lack the word but have the thing;and thousands who would fail to find relief on the classical hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might imitate his landlord, who practiced sharp-shooting with a medieval hunting-bow till he could challenge the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison. In a choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is, indeed, clearly preferable to games of chance; but[82]to that last resort of inanity the traditional aversion to manual employments has actually driven thousands of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never sunk to the abject effeminacy of European cities, where physical apathy has become a test of good breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments a stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently, social prestige has to be purchased at the price of practical helplessness, of dependence in all mechanical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of hirelings.Life-endangering accident may now and then illustrate the disadvantages of physical incapacity; a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that the saving influence of a swimming-school might compare favorably with that of the baptismal miracle tank; but the survivors will persist in relying on the vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity avenges itself in every waking hour, even of the wealthiest weakling, while the guardian-spirit of Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to the playground and follows them over mountains and seas.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The growing impatience with the dead-language system of our monkish school-plan will soon lead to a radical reform of college education, and a fair portion of the time gained should be devoted to the culture of mechanical arts. For boys in their teens the “instinct of constructiveness” would still prove to retain enough of its native energy to make the change[83]a decidedly popular one, as demonstrated by the success of the mechanical training schools that have attracted many pupils who have to find the requisite leisure by stinting themselves in their recreations. “Applied gymnastics” (riding, swimming, etc.) would be still more popular, and greatly lessen the yearly list of accidents from the neglect of such training.The bias of fashion would soon be modified by the precedence of its leaders, as in Prussia, where the royal family set a good example by educating their princes (in addition to the inevitable military training) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplishment (carpentry, sculpture, bookbinding, etc.), the choice of handicraft being optional with the pupil. No model residence should be deemed complete without a polytechnic workshop, furnished with a panoply of apparatus for the practice of all sorts of amateur chemical and mechanical pursuits—a plan by which the Hungarian statesman-author, Maurus Jockar, has banished the specter ofennuifrom his hospitable country seat. His private hobby is Black Art, as he calls his experiments in recondite chemistry, but any one of his guests is welcome to try his hand at wood-carving, glass-painting, metallurgy, or any of the more primitive crafts, for which the laboratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus. Private taste might, of course, modify the details of that plan, and even without regard to eventual results, its proximate benefits if once known would alone insure its general adoption in the homes of theennui-stricken classes. The educational advantages[84]of mechanical training, though, can, indeed, hardly be overrated. A scholar with nerveless arms and undextrous hands is as far from being a complete man as a nimble savage with an undeveloped brain.[85]
CHAPTER V.SKILL.
[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift. The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision. The young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as well as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in steering its way through the maze of a tangled forest.Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such accomplishments by long practice. Instead of driving them back to their nests, their parents encourage their attempts at longer and longer flights, and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow and sets her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens practice mouse-catching by playing with balls; puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels play at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A British naturalist, who had domesticated a young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam across the floor of his study. The little engineer[74]had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood, etc., and piled them up to best advantage, placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the interspaces with letters and journals. Every now and then he would “stand off” to scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to mend a misarrangement here and there.Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels, or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal American boy a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet copy of Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law which required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for three hours a day was probably the most popular statute of the British code. On new railroads, bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young rustics, who forego the pleasures of nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipulations of a new handicraft. Even in after years the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates have defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of tools and passing whole days in the retirement of an[75]amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I. invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and bird-traps. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter of his empire.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The English wordking, like Danishkongand GermanKönig, are derived fromkönnen(practical knowledge), and the first ruler was the most skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill, whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness, established the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many respects a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops. Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of self-reliance which wealth can only counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I once overheard a controversy on the comparative value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found clever advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in four different continents. “There’s a use for all that, no[76]doubt,” said he, “but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable as the library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is often only the outcome of such expertness, and in sudden emergencies theories are shamed by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the superiorconstructivenessof an army that could bridge a river while their opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turkish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention of the chain grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet[77]Goethe, whose intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical by-trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental as well as physical debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of Nature which no cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a school of practical wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the English language happily expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and mechanics far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth could dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best safeguard against the chief bane of wealth:ennui, with its temptations to folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his philanthropic life in practical landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators, and the benefits of his plan would extend to emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments afford only a dubious safeguard. “A mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques Rousseau, “is the best basis of safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical scholarship may go begging, where technical skill finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may recover his loss in the course of years; a skilful mechanic need only enter the next workshop and show[78]a sample of his handiwork. ‘Well, let’s see you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch in.’ ”Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against numberless perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by keeping him at home and guarding him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets that her apron-strings cannot guide him through the perils of after years; and a better plan was that of Cato, the statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in the midst of his manifold duties, found time to instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect tendency of thatcaste spiritwhich has for ages fostered the antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children of toil that aSudrawas not permitted to approach a priest without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast by[79]constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him? You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the sameRitterwho would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by[80]highway robbery. The princes of the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for secular concerns.That sort ofother-worldlinessstill seems to bias our plans of education. Colleges that would fear to lose prestige by devoting a few minutes a week to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens of hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical miracle-monger. Mechanical mastership (after all, the basis of all science) is denied a place among the honorable “faculties” of our high-schools. Fashionable parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of a boy who should visit joiner-shops and smithies, instead of following his aristocratic friends to the club-house. They would bewail the profanation of his social rank, if he should accept an invitation to impart his skill to the pupils of a mechanical training-school; but would connive at the mental prostitution of a young sneak who should try to reëstablish a sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers of a mythology-school.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Neglected development, either of physical or mental faculties, avenges itself inennui, modified, for the benefit of the poor, by the less monotonous[81]afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is a wholly abnormal condition, as unknown to the children of the wilderness, who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties, as to the truly civilized man, who finds means to satisfy that craving. Unemployed muscles, like idle talents, rebel against continued neglect and goad the sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of vice, and the father who thinks it a waste of money to invest a dollar in a tool-box may have to spend hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and gambling debts.Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were rather rare in the prime of the North American republic, when nearly every colonist was a farmer, and every farm apolytechnicumof home-taught trades; but European luxuries introduced European habits, and our cities now abound with plutocrats who are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers laid the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred the vices faster than the refinements of wealth, and have become acquainted withennui—We lack the word but have the thing;and thousands who would fail to find relief on the classical hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might imitate his landlord, who practiced sharp-shooting with a medieval hunting-bow till he could challenge the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison. In a choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is, indeed, clearly preferable to games of chance; but[82]to that last resort of inanity the traditional aversion to manual employments has actually driven thousands of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never sunk to the abject effeminacy of European cities, where physical apathy has become a test of good breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments a stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently, social prestige has to be purchased at the price of practical helplessness, of dependence in all mechanical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of hirelings.Life-endangering accident may now and then illustrate the disadvantages of physical incapacity; a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that the saving influence of a swimming-school might compare favorably with that of the baptismal miracle tank; but the survivors will persist in relying on the vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity avenges itself in every waking hour, even of the wealthiest weakling, while the guardian-spirit of Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to the playground and follows them over mountains and seas.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The growing impatience with the dead-language system of our monkish school-plan will soon lead to a radical reform of college education, and a fair portion of the time gained should be devoted to the culture of mechanical arts. For boys in their teens the “instinct of constructiveness” would still prove to retain enough of its native energy to make the change[83]a decidedly popular one, as demonstrated by the success of the mechanical training schools that have attracted many pupils who have to find the requisite leisure by stinting themselves in their recreations. “Applied gymnastics” (riding, swimming, etc.) would be still more popular, and greatly lessen the yearly list of accidents from the neglect of such training.The bias of fashion would soon be modified by the precedence of its leaders, as in Prussia, where the royal family set a good example by educating their princes (in addition to the inevitable military training) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplishment (carpentry, sculpture, bookbinding, etc.), the choice of handicraft being optional with the pupil. No model residence should be deemed complete without a polytechnic workshop, furnished with a panoply of apparatus for the practice of all sorts of amateur chemical and mechanical pursuits—a plan by which the Hungarian statesman-author, Maurus Jockar, has banished the specter ofennuifrom his hospitable country seat. His private hobby is Black Art, as he calls his experiments in recondite chemistry, but any one of his guests is welcome to try his hand at wood-carving, glass-painting, metallurgy, or any of the more primitive crafts, for which the laboratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus. Private taste might, of course, modify the details of that plan, and even without regard to eventual results, its proximate benefits if once known would alone insure its general adoption in the homes of theennui-stricken classes. The educational advantages[84]of mechanical training, though, can, indeed, hardly be overrated. A scholar with nerveless arms and undextrous hands is as far from being a complete man as a nimble savage with an undeveloped brain.[85]
[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift. The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision. The young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as well as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in steering its way through the maze of a tangled forest.Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such accomplishments by long practice. Instead of driving them back to their nests, their parents encourage their attempts at longer and longer flights, and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow and sets her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens practice mouse-catching by playing with balls; puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels play at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A British naturalist, who had domesticated a young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam across the floor of his study. The little engineer[74]had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood, etc., and piled them up to best advantage, placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the interspaces with letters and journals. Every now and then he would “stand off” to scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to mend a misarrangement here and there.Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels, or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal American boy a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet copy of Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law which required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for three hours a day was probably the most popular statute of the British code. On new railroads, bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young rustics, who forego the pleasures of nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipulations of a new handicraft. Even in after years the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates have defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of tools and passing whole days in the retirement of an[75]amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I. invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and bird-traps. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter of his empire.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift. The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision. The young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as well as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in steering its way through the maze of a tangled forest.Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such accomplishments by long practice. Instead of driving them back to their nests, their parents encourage their attempts at longer and longer flights, and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow and sets her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens practice mouse-catching by playing with balls; puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels play at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A British naturalist, who had domesticated a young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam across the floor of his study. The little engineer[74]had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood, etc., and piled them up to best advantage, placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the interspaces with letters and journals. Every now and then he would “stand off” to scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to mend a misarrangement here and there.Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels, or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal American boy a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet copy of Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law which required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for three hours a day was probably the most popular statute of the British code. On new railroads, bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young rustics, who forego the pleasures of nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipulations of a new handicraft. Even in after years the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates have defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of tools and passing whole days in the retirement of an[75]amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I. invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and bird-traps. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter of his empire.
The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift. The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision. The young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as well as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in steering its way through the maze of a tangled forest.
Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such accomplishments by long practice. Instead of driving them back to their nests, their parents encourage their attempts at longer and longer flights, and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow and sets her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens practice mouse-catching by playing with balls; puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels play at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A British naturalist, who had domesticated a young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam across the floor of his study. The little engineer[74]had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood, etc., and piled them up to best advantage, placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the interspaces with letters and journals. Every now and then he would “stand off” to scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to mend a misarrangement here and there.
Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels, or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal American boy a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet copy of Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law which required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for three hours a day was probably the most popular statute of the British code. On new railroads, bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young rustics, who forego the pleasures of nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipulations of a new handicraft. Even in after years the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates have defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of tools and passing whole days in the retirement of an[75]amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I. invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and bird-traps. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter of his empire.
[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.The English wordking, like Danishkongand GermanKönig, are derived fromkönnen(practical knowledge), and the first ruler was the most skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill, whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness, established the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many respects a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops. Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of self-reliance which wealth can only counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I once overheard a controversy on the comparative value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found clever advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in four different continents. “There’s a use for all that, no[76]doubt,” said he, “but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable as the library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is often only the outcome of such expertness, and in sudden emergencies theories are shamed by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the superiorconstructivenessof an army that could bridge a river while their opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turkish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention of the chain grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet[77]Goethe, whose intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical by-trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental as well as physical debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of Nature which no cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a school of practical wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the English language happily expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and mechanics far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth could dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best safeguard against the chief bane of wealth:ennui, with its temptations to folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his philanthropic life in practical landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators, and the benefits of his plan would extend to emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments afford only a dubious safeguard. “A mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques Rousseau, “is the best basis of safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical scholarship may go begging, where technical skill finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may recover his loss in the course of years; a skilful mechanic need only enter the next workshop and show[78]a sample of his handiwork. ‘Well, let’s see you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch in.’ ”Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against numberless perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by keeping him at home and guarding him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets that her apron-strings cannot guide him through the perils of after years; and a better plan was that of Cato, the statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in the midst of his manifold duties, found time to instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The English wordking, like Danishkongand GermanKönig, are derived fromkönnen(practical knowledge), and the first ruler was the most skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill, whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness, established the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many respects a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops. Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of self-reliance which wealth can only counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I once overheard a controversy on the comparative value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found clever advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in four different continents. “There’s a use for all that, no[76]doubt,” said he, “but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable as the library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is often only the outcome of such expertness, and in sudden emergencies theories are shamed by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the superiorconstructivenessof an army that could bridge a river while their opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turkish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention of the chain grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet[77]Goethe, whose intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical by-trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental as well as physical debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of Nature which no cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a school of practical wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the English language happily expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and mechanics far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth could dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best safeguard against the chief bane of wealth:ennui, with its temptations to folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his philanthropic life in practical landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators, and the benefits of his plan would extend to emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments afford only a dubious safeguard. “A mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques Rousseau, “is the best basis of safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical scholarship may go begging, where technical skill finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may recover his loss in the course of years; a skilful mechanic need only enter the next workshop and show[78]a sample of his handiwork. ‘Well, let’s see you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch in.’ ”Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against numberless perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by keeping him at home and guarding him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets that her apron-strings cannot guide him through the perils of after years; and a better plan was that of Cato, the statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in the midst of his manifold duties, found time to instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”
The English wordking, like Danishkongand GermanKönig, are derived fromkönnen(practical knowledge), and the first ruler was the most skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill, whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness, established the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many respects a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops. Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of self-reliance which wealth can only counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I once overheard a controversy on the comparative value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found clever advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in four different continents. “There’s a use for all that, no[76]doubt,” said he, “but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable as the library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is often only the outcome of such expertness, and in sudden emergencies theories are shamed by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the superiorconstructivenessof an army that could bridge a river while their opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turkish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention of the chain grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.
Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet[77]Goethe, whose intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical by-trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental as well as physical debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of Nature which no cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a school of practical wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the English language happily expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and mechanics far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.
Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth could dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best safeguard against the chief bane of wealth:ennui, with its temptations to folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his philanthropic life in practical landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators, and the benefits of his plan would extend to emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments afford only a dubious safeguard. “A mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques Rousseau, “is the best basis of safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical scholarship may go begging, where technical skill finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may recover his loss in the course of years; a skilful mechanic need only enter the next workshop and show[78]a sample of his handiwork. ‘Well, let’s see you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch in.’ ”
Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against numberless perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by keeping him at home and guarding him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets that her apron-strings cannot guide him through the perils of after years; and a better plan was that of Cato, the statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in the midst of his manifold duties, found time to instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”
[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect tendency of thatcaste spiritwhich has for ages fostered the antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children of toil that aSudrawas not permitted to approach a priest without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast by[79]constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him? You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the sameRitterwho would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by[80]highway robbery. The princes of the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for secular concerns.That sort ofother-worldlinessstill seems to bias our plans of education. Colleges that would fear to lose prestige by devoting a few minutes a week to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens of hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical miracle-monger. Mechanical mastership (after all, the basis of all science) is denied a place among the honorable “faculties” of our high-schools. Fashionable parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of a boy who should visit joiner-shops and smithies, instead of following his aristocratic friends to the club-house. They would bewail the profanation of his social rank, if he should accept an invitation to impart his skill to the pupils of a mechanical training-school; but would connive at the mental prostitution of a young sneak who should try to reëstablish a sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers of a mythology-school.
C.—PERVERSION.
The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect tendency of thatcaste spiritwhich has for ages fostered the antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children of toil that aSudrawas not permitted to approach a priest without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast by[79]constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him? You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the sameRitterwho would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by[80]highway robbery. The princes of the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for secular concerns.That sort ofother-worldlinessstill seems to bias our plans of education. Colleges that would fear to lose prestige by devoting a few minutes a week to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens of hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical miracle-monger. Mechanical mastership (after all, the basis of all science) is denied a place among the honorable “faculties” of our high-schools. Fashionable parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of a boy who should visit joiner-shops and smithies, instead of following his aristocratic friends to the club-house. They would bewail the profanation of his social rank, if he should accept an invitation to impart his skill to the pupils of a mechanical training-school; but would connive at the mental prostitution of a young sneak who should try to reëstablish a sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers of a mythology-school.
The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect tendency of thatcaste spiritwhich has for ages fostered the antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children of toil that aSudrawas not permitted to approach a priest without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.
The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast by[79]constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him? You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the sameRitterwho would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by[80]highway robbery. The princes of the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for secular concerns.
That sort ofother-worldlinessstill seems to bias our plans of education. Colleges that would fear to lose prestige by devoting a few minutes a week to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens of hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical miracle-monger. Mechanical mastership (after all, the basis of all science) is denied a place among the honorable “faculties” of our high-schools. Fashionable parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of a boy who should visit joiner-shops and smithies, instead of following his aristocratic friends to the club-house. They would bewail the profanation of his social rank, if he should accept an invitation to impart his skill to the pupils of a mechanical training-school; but would connive at the mental prostitution of a young sneak who should try to reëstablish a sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers of a mythology-school.
[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Neglected development, either of physical or mental faculties, avenges itself inennui, modified, for the benefit of the poor, by the less monotonous[81]afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is a wholly abnormal condition, as unknown to the children of the wilderness, who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties, as to the truly civilized man, who finds means to satisfy that craving. Unemployed muscles, like idle talents, rebel against continued neglect and goad the sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of vice, and the father who thinks it a waste of money to invest a dollar in a tool-box may have to spend hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and gambling debts.Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were rather rare in the prime of the North American republic, when nearly every colonist was a farmer, and every farm apolytechnicumof home-taught trades; but European luxuries introduced European habits, and our cities now abound with plutocrats who are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers laid the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred the vices faster than the refinements of wealth, and have become acquainted withennui—We lack the word but have the thing;and thousands who would fail to find relief on the classical hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might imitate his landlord, who practiced sharp-shooting with a medieval hunting-bow till he could challenge the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison. In a choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is, indeed, clearly preferable to games of chance; but[82]to that last resort of inanity the traditional aversion to manual employments has actually driven thousands of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never sunk to the abject effeminacy of European cities, where physical apathy has become a test of good breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments a stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently, social prestige has to be purchased at the price of practical helplessness, of dependence in all mechanical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of hirelings.Life-endangering accident may now and then illustrate the disadvantages of physical incapacity; a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that the saving influence of a swimming-school might compare favorably with that of the baptismal miracle tank; but the survivors will persist in relying on the vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity avenges itself in every waking hour, even of the wealthiest weakling, while the guardian-spirit of Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to the playground and follows them over mountains and seas.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Neglected development, either of physical or mental faculties, avenges itself inennui, modified, for the benefit of the poor, by the less monotonous[81]afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is a wholly abnormal condition, as unknown to the children of the wilderness, who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties, as to the truly civilized man, who finds means to satisfy that craving. Unemployed muscles, like idle talents, rebel against continued neglect and goad the sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of vice, and the father who thinks it a waste of money to invest a dollar in a tool-box may have to spend hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and gambling debts.Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were rather rare in the prime of the North American republic, when nearly every colonist was a farmer, and every farm apolytechnicumof home-taught trades; but European luxuries introduced European habits, and our cities now abound with plutocrats who are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers laid the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred the vices faster than the refinements of wealth, and have become acquainted withennui—We lack the word but have the thing;and thousands who would fail to find relief on the classical hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might imitate his landlord, who practiced sharp-shooting with a medieval hunting-bow till he could challenge the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison. In a choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is, indeed, clearly preferable to games of chance; but[82]to that last resort of inanity the traditional aversion to manual employments has actually driven thousands of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never sunk to the abject effeminacy of European cities, where physical apathy has become a test of good breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments a stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently, social prestige has to be purchased at the price of practical helplessness, of dependence in all mechanical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of hirelings.Life-endangering accident may now and then illustrate the disadvantages of physical incapacity; a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that the saving influence of a swimming-school might compare favorably with that of the baptismal miracle tank; but the survivors will persist in relying on the vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity avenges itself in every waking hour, even of the wealthiest weakling, while the guardian-spirit of Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to the playground and follows them over mountains and seas.
Neglected development, either of physical or mental faculties, avenges itself inennui, modified, for the benefit of the poor, by the less monotonous[81]afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is a wholly abnormal condition, as unknown to the children of the wilderness, who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties, as to the truly civilized man, who finds means to satisfy that craving. Unemployed muscles, like idle talents, rebel against continued neglect and goad the sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of vice, and the father who thinks it a waste of money to invest a dollar in a tool-box may have to spend hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and gambling debts.
Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were rather rare in the prime of the North American republic, when nearly every colonist was a farmer, and every farm apolytechnicumof home-taught trades; but European luxuries introduced European habits, and our cities now abound with plutocrats who are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers laid the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred the vices faster than the refinements of wealth, and have become acquainted withennui—
We lack the word but have the thing;
and thousands who would fail to find relief on the classical hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might imitate his landlord, who practiced sharp-shooting with a medieval hunting-bow till he could challenge the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison. In a choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is, indeed, clearly preferable to games of chance; but[82]to that last resort of inanity the traditional aversion to manual employments has actually driven thousands of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never sunk to the abject effeminacy of European cities, where physical apathy has become a test of good breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments a stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently, social prestige has to be purchased at the price of practical helplessness, of dependence in all mechanical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of hirelings.
Life-endangering accident may now and then illustrate the disadvantages of physical incapacity; a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that the saving influence of a swimming-school might compare favorably with that of the baptismal miracle tank; but the survivors will persist in relying on the vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity avenges itself in every waking hour, even of the wealthiest weakling, while the guardian-spirit of Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to the playground and follows them over mountains and seas.
[Contents]E.—REFORM.The growing impatience with the dead-language system of our monkish school-plan will soon lead to a radical reform of college education, and a fair portion of the time gained should be devoted to the culture of mechanical arts. For boys in their teens the “instinct of constructiveness” would still prove to retain enough of its native energy to make the change[83]a decidedly popular one, as demonstrated by the success of the mechanical training schools that have attracted many pupils who have to find the requisite leisure by stinting themselves in their recreations. “Applied gymnastics” (riding, swimming, etc.) would be still more popular, and greatly lessen the yearly list of accidents from the neglect of such training.The bias of fashion would soon be modified by the precedence of its leaders, as in Prussia, where the royal family set a good example by educating their princes (in addition to the inevitable military training) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplishment (carpentry, sculpture, bookbinding, etc.), the choice of handicraft being optional with the pupil. No model residence should be deemed complete without a polytechnic workshop, furnished with a panoply of apparatus for the practice of all sorts of amateur chemical and mechanical pursuits—a plan by which the Hungarian statesman-author, Maurus Jockar, has banished the specter ofennuifrom his hospitable country seat. His private hobby is Black Art, as he calls his experiments in recondite chemistry, but any one of his guests is welcome to try his hand at wood-carving, glass-painting, metallurgy, or any of the more primitive crafts, for which the laboratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus. Private taste might, of course, modify the details of that plan, and even without regard to eventual results, its proximate benefits if once known would alone insure its general adoption in the homes of theennui-stricken classes. The educational advantages[84]of mechanical training, though, can, indeed, hardly be overrated. A scholar with nerveless arms and undextrous hands is as far from being a complete man as a nimble savage with an undeveloped brain.[85]
E.—REFORM.
The growing impatience with the dead-language system of our monkish school-plan will soon lead to a radical reform of college education, and a fair portion of the time gained should be devoted to the culture of mechanical arts. For boys in their teens the “instinct of constructiveness” would still prove to retain enough of its native energy to make the change[83]a decidedly popular one, as demonstrated by the success of the mechanical training schools that have attracted many pupils who have to find the requisite leisure by stinting themselves in their recreations. “Applied gymnastics” (riding, swimming, etc.) would be still more popular, and greatly lessen the yearly list of accidents from the neglect of such training.The bias of fashion would soon be modified by the precedence of its leaders, as in Prussia, where the royal family set a good example by educating their princes (in addition to the inevitable military training) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplishment (carpentry, sculpture, bookbinding, etc.), the choice of handicraft being optional with the pupil. No model residence should be deemed complete without a polytechnic workshop, furnished with a panoply of apparatus for the practice of all sorts of amateur chemical and mechanical pursuits—a plan by which the Hungarian statesman-author, Maurus Jockar, has banished the specter ofennuifrom his hospitable country seat. His private hobby is Black Art, as he calls his experiments in recondite chemistry, but any one of his guests is welcome to try his hand at wood-carving, glass-painting, metallurgy, or any of the more primitive crafts, for which the laboratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus. Private taste might, of course, modify the details of that plan, and even without regard to eventual results, its proximate benefits if once known would alone insure its general adoption in the homes of theennui-stricken classes. The educational advantages[84]of mechanical training, though, can, indeed, hardly be overrated. A scholar with nerveless arms and undextrous hands is as far from being a complete man as a nimble savage with an undeveloped brain.[85]
The growing impatience with the dead-language system of our monkish school-plan will soon lead to a radical reform of college education, and a fair portion of the time gained should be devoted to the culture of mechanical arts. For boys in their teens the “instinct of constructiveness” would still prove to retain enough of its native energy to make the change[83]a decidedly popular one, as demonstrated by the success of the mechanical training schools that have attracted many pupils who have to find the requisite leisure by stinting themselves in their recreations. “Applied gymnastics” (riding, swimming, etc.) would be still more popular, and greatly lessen the yearly list of accidents from the neglect of such training.
The bias of fashion would soon be modified by the precedence of its leaders, as in Prussia, where the royal family set a good example by educating their princes (in addition to the inevitable military training) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplishment (carpentry, sculpture, bookbinding, etc.), the choice of handicraft being optional with the pupil. No model residence should be deemed complete without a polytechnic workshop, furnished with a panoply of apparatus for the practice of all sorts of amateur chemical and mechanical pursuits—a plan by which the Hungarian statesman-author, Maurus Jockar, has banished the specter ofennuifrom his hospitable country seat. His private hobby is Black Art, as he calls his experiments in recondite chemistry, but any one of his guests is welcome to try his hand at wood-carving, glass-painting, metallurgy, or any of the more primitive crafts, for which the laboratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus. Private taste might, of course, modify the details of that plan, and even without regard to eventual results, its proximate benefits if once known would alone insure its general adoption in the homes of theennui-stricken classes. The educational advantages[84]of mechanical training, though, can, indeed, hardly be overrated. A scholar with nerveless arms and undextrous hands is as far from being a complete man as a nimble savage with an undeveloped brain.[85]