THE MAN WHO WORKS WITH HIS HANDS

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

The fiftieth anniversary of the founding of this College is an event of national significance, for Michigan was the first state in the Union to found this, the first agricultural college in America. The nation is to be congratulated on the fact that the Congress at Washington has repeatedly enacted laws designed to aid the several states in establishing and maintaining agricultural and mechanical colleges. I greet all such colleges, through their representatives who have gathered here today, and bid them Godspeed in their work. I no less heartily invoke success for the mechanical and agricultural schools; and I wish to say that I have heard particularly good reports of the Minnesota Agricultural High School for the way in which it sends its graduates back to the farms to work as practical farmers.

OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM AND WHAT IT LACKS

As a people there is nothing in which we take a juster pride than our educational system. It is our boast that every boy or girl has the chance to get a school training; and we feel it is a prime national duty to furnish this training free, because only thereby can we secure the proper type of citizenship in the average American. Our public schools and our colleges have done their work well, and there is no class of our citizens deserving of heartier praise than the men and women who teach in them.

Nevertheless, for at least a generation we have been waking to the knowledge that there must be additional education beyond that provided in the public school as it is managed today. Our school system has hitherto been well-nigh wholly lacking on the side of industrial training, of the training which fits a man

for the shop and the farm. This is a most serious lack, for no one can look at the peoples of mankind as they stand at present without realizing that industrial training is one of the most potent factors in national development. We of the United States must develop a system under which each individual citizen shall be trained so as to be effective individually as an economic unit and fit to be organized with his fellows, so that he and they can work in efficient fashion together. This question is vital to our future progress, and public attention should be focused upon it. Surely it is eminently in accord with the principles of our democratic life that we should furnish the highest average industrial training for the ordinary skilled workman. But it is a curious thing that in industrial training we have tended to devote our energies to producing high-grade men at the top rather than in the ranks. Our engineering schools, for instance, compare favorably with the best in Europe, whereas we have done almost nothing to equip the private soldiers of the industrial army—the mechanic, the metal-worker, the carpenter. Indeed, too often our schools train away from the shop and the forge; and this fact, together with the abandonment of the old apprentice system, has resulted in such an absence of facilities for providing trained journeymen that in many of our trades almost all the recruits among the workmen are foreigners. Surely this means that there must be some systematic method provided for training young men in the trades, and that this must be co-ordinated with the public-school system. No industrial school can turn out a finished journeyman; but it can furnish the material out of which a finished journeyman can be made, just as an engineering school furnishes the training which enables its graduates speedily to become engineers.

We hear a great deal of the need of protecting our workingmen from competition with pauper labor. I have very little fear of the competition of pauper labor. The nations with pauper labor are not the formidable industrial competitors of

this country. What the American workingman has to fear is the competition of the highly skilled workingman of the countries of greatest industrial efficiency. By the tariff and by our immigration laws we can always protect ourselves against the competition of pauper labor here at home; but when we contend for the markets of the world we can get no protection, and we shall then find that our most formidable competitors are the nations in which there is the most highly developed business ability, the most highly developed industrial skill; and these are the qualities which we must ourselves develop.

DIGNITY AND IMPORTANCE OF LABOR

We have been fond as a nation of speaking of the dignity of labor, meaning thereby manual labor. Personally I don't think that we begin to understand what a high place manual labor should take; and it never can take this high place unless it offers scope for the best type of man. We have tended to regard education as a matter of the head only, and the result is that a great many of our people, themselves the sons of men who worked with their hands, seem to think that they rise in the world if they get into a position where they do no hard manual work whatever; where their hands will grow soft, and their working-clothes will be kept clean. Such a conception is both false and mischievous. There are, of course, kinds of labor where the work must be purely mental, and there are other kinds of labor where, under existing conditions, very little demand indeed is made upon the mind, though I am glad to say that I think the proportion of men engaged in this kind of work is diminishing. But in any healthy community, in any community with the great solid qualities which alone make a really great nation, the bulk of the people should do work which makes demands upon both the body and the mind. Progress cannot permanently consist in the abandonment of physical labor, but in the development of physical labor so that it shall represent more and more the work of the

trained mind in the trained body. To provide such training, to encourage in every way the production of the men whom it alone can produce, is to show that as a nation we have a true conception of the dignity and importance of labor. The calling of the skilled tiller of the soil, the calling of the skilled mechanic, should alike be recognized as professions, just as emphatically as the callings of lawyer, of doctor, or banker, merchant, or clerk. The printer, the electrical worker, the house painter, the foundry man, should be trained just as carefully as the stenographer or the drug clerk. They should be trained alike in head and in hand. They should get over the idea that to earn twelve dollars a week and call it "salary" is better than to earn twenty-five dollars a week and call it "wages." The young man who has the courage and the ability to refuse to enter the crowded field of the so-called professions and to take to constructive industry is almost sure of an ample reward in earnings, in health, in opportunity to marry early, and to establish a home with reasonable freedom from worry. We need the training, the manual dexterity, and industrial intelligence which can best be given in a good agricultural, or building, or textile, or watchmaking, or engraving, or mechanical school. It should be one of our prime objects to put the mechanic, the wage-worker who works with his hands, and who ought to work in a constantly larger degree with his head, on a higher plane of efficiency and reward, so as to increase his effectiveness in the economic world, and therefore the dignity, the remuneration, and the power of his position in the social world. To train boys and girls in merely literary accomplishments to the total exclusion of industrial, manual, and technical training tends to unfit them for industrial work; and in real life most work is industrial.

The problem of furnishing well-trained craftsmen, or rather journeymen fitted in the end to become such, is not simple-few problems are simple in the actual process of their solution-and much care and forethought and practical common-sense will be

needed, in order to work it out in a fairly satisfactory manner. It should appeal to all our citizens. I am glad that societies have already been formed to promote industrial education, and that their membership includes manufacturers and leaders of labor unions, educators and publicists, men of all conditions who are interested in education and in industry. It is such co-operation that offers most hope for a satisfactory solution of the question as to what is the best form of industrial school, as to the means by which it may be articulated with the public-school system, and as to the way to secure for the boys trained therein the opportunity to acquire in the industries the practical skill which alone can make them finished journeymen.

THE FARMER IN RELATION TO THE WELFARE OF THE WHOLE COUNTRY

There is but one person whose welfare is as vital to the welfare of the whole country as is that of the wage-worker who does manual labor, and that is the tiller of the soil-the farmer. If there is one lesson taught by history, it is that the permanent greatness of any state must ultimately depend more upon the character of its country population than upon anything else. No growth of cities, no growth of wealth, can make up for a loss in either the number or the character of the farming population. In the United States more than in almost any other country we should realize this and should prize our country population. When this nation began its independent existence it was as a nation of farmers. The towns were small and were for the most part mere seacoast trading and fishing ports. The chief industry of the country was agriculture, and the ordinary citizen was in some way connected with it. In every great crisis of the past a peculiar dependence has had to be placed upon the farming population; and this dependence has hitherto been justified. But it cannot be justified in the future if agriculture is permitted to sink in the scale as compared with other employments. We