Lind be born here, she must be trained to music; if John Milton be born here, he must be trained to letters; and none of the follies of Adam Smith, or of the other economists, must condemn them to heading pins or spinning cotton. But, as we live, we are fast losing the opportunities for this variety of training. We begin bravely on the broad system of the public schools. But it must be remembered that it is said that the average Boston boy leaves school forever before he is twelve years old. What is it, then, for which you have trained him? Anybody who knows the real openings for those boys will tell you that it seems as if they were fit for nothing but to be news-boys or cash-boys in the great retail shops, or sellers of lozenges at the door of the Museum.

Now, these are not good preparations for life. Nobody ever saw a grown-up cash-boy, or a grown-up lozenge-boy. My friends, the manufacturers, say that they are glad to have a few of these boys in their mills; but I have to say to them that ten hours a day at the loom or the spinning-frame is not a good education for manhood or womanhood. I have to remind them that the prime business of a Christian State is not to make cottons, but to make men and women.

And

Now, the report has told you what are the causes for the difficulty in training boys to the use of their hands and heads together. We want the trained mechanic as much as we ever did. But our system, alas, no longer permits the trained man in his workshop to give a personal training to the boy who is to learn. Our system even keeps boys out of the sight of workmen, so that they really tell a story of a boy of sixteen, who had never seen any mechanic at his work, except a plumber, and that boy chose a plumber's trade because he did not know what else to choose! What follows all this difficulty in teaching boys to use the powers God has given them? Why, there grows up a race of inefficient men, who have not learned to do anything at all. They are left in the grade of mere brute labor, because they have learned no art or handicraft in their boyhood.

Mr. Hale continued :—

Here is the point of view from which I look upon this subject: For more than twenty years now, it has been my duty to study all the questions of city poverty, of pauperism, and of other misery; and I tell you what any working minister will tell you, that, after intemperance, the worst evil you have is your body of untrained laborers, and that your present social status makes no provision for the training of labor. It is to supply this central need that Mr. Ruggles proposes his plan of the Developing School, and the schools connected with it.

I am perfectly willing to admit that the best plan was the old New England plan. The fathers builded better than they knew when they sent a boy to school for three months, and then kept him at work for three months at the bench, in the fishing-boat, or on the farm. But we think we have outgrown that system. We compel the school-boy, while he is a school-boy, to keep at school all the time. We teach him to calculate how many bushels of oats can be exchanged against how many bushels of wheat, when oats are so much and wheat is so much, and he does not, for all our teachings, know a kernel of oats nor a kernel of wheat when he sees them. Then, finding our boys good for nothing, we turn round and beg the schools to undertake their training. Just as we have made the schools teach a little music, and a little drawing, and a little sewing, we ask them to be good enough to teach a little filing, and a little planing, and a little sawing. But all this is merely overburdening the school system, which is overburdened already; and it does not provide for the separate training of each boy, according to his own personal ability.

What Mr. Ruggles's plan suggests is a school to which the boy shall come when he is of proper age to learn his trade, — where he shall first be tried, by an intelligent master, on different lines of work. The report which has been read explains to you the detail. In a few months, or perhaps weeks, we shall know whether this boy will be a good ma

chinist, or a good founder, or a good carpenter, or good watchmaker. We shall know his physical aptitudes, his moral aptitudes; we shall know what line of work he can follow well. Then we shall be prepared to take him into the separate school, where that aptitude can be best developed.

I am told by skilful men, and I believe, that under two years of such careful training, for the new purpose of training, an intelligent boy will learn more than he would learn in seven years of the old apprenticeship, knocked about here and there, left to run errands or to take the rough work generally, perhaps making rivets for a year, if there were need of rivets, or punching-holes for a year, if there were need of holes. If that estimate be true, our plan proposes to save five years of each young man's life, and to give it to him as his freedom present, even before he comes of age.

We wish the State to add this developing system to its system of schools, because the State can do it better than any private corporation. The State has determined, wisely, that all the larger towns shall teach Latin and Greek in the public schools, shall prepare boys and girls for college. It has determined, wisely, that they shall teach drawing in those schools, resolving to develop the hardly budding genius of art in our manufactures. Let it determine, with the same wisdom, not to be dependent on the workshops of other lands for the skilled workmen whom it must have, if its great enterprises are to prosper.

It is an interesting reflection that when Robert Stephenson had conceived, and, I may say, determined on, that great invention of the locomotive, which has revolutionized the world, he knew so well what he needed, and the world needed, that he did not so much as attempt to build his model till he had first trained the machinists who were to build it with him. The machine-shop in which the "Rocket" was built had been first the training-school of the machinists who built her; and, when the great day of trial came, the result appeared. She did not break down on experiment in the competition with her rivals. They did. They did. She did not

need to be hauled off for repairs. What she was bidden to do she did. What he had prophesied, she performed. And the day that the great trial was over, modern society, had it only known it, was re-born! In that new birth it was needed that Robert Stephenson should fitly train a school of machinists to their duty.

I cannot but believe that so soon as the State throws the prestige of the public school system around its schools of industry, and opens them as freely as it opens its schools of Latin, of Greek, and of the higher mathematics, we shall see boys of enterprise and ingenuity and quickness of eye, repair to them with as much eagerness as boys now repair to West Point or to Annapolis, with more eagerness than they show in going to Yale and Harvard. The State will have provided what its system now lacks, and will meet the wants and aspirations, as it trains the inborn faculties, of every child of God born into its arms.

MR. ELIZUR WRIGHT.

MR. PRESIDENT: The filing school, so thoroughly illustrated, seems to be quite aside from the aim of the report before the Association, and rather in the line which we wish to avoid. The tendency of the present system of manufactures is to turn the boy into a tool instead of a man, a tool that must rust when out of employ, instead of a man who can get his living and more, everywhere. We wish to educate the boy, not into a filing tool of the highest possible perfection, or drilling tool, or turning tool; but into a master of so large a variety of tools, that he can create all the parts of some complicated and useful mechanism, so as to work, and produce something. Boyhood is not long enough to acquire absolute perfection in perhaps any one of a score of common old-fashioned hand-tools, which, used with the highest possible skill, can produce surprising and beautiful results.

The trouble is, if it were long enough, the beautiful result produced would not be the production of the twenty persons

using the twenty tools, but of some superintending brain which used twenty human tools or twenty inanimate tools to produce it. Of all old-fashioned tools the file is perhaps the most painfully difficult to use perfectly. It lies at the very foundation of the metallic arts, and, without very high skill in its use, the present system of machinery could not have been born. But that once in existence, the importance and domain of the file, and the miraculously true filer, shrink almost into insignificance. If people were hereafter to be born without legs, the accomplishment of standing on one's head and walking on his hands would assume great importance. So if planing and turning engines, including the turning of irregular forms, were to be lost to mankind, the old marvellous skill in the use of the file might loom up again.

What we want in the field of practical education is some substitute for the dead apprenticeship system. In the presence of machinery in great establishments, the old trades which were handed down from father to son are either abolished or shrivelled to littleness.

The Yankee boy, the most constructive "critter" naturally in the world, is pretty much shut out from the sight of all sorts of tools. And, knowing nothing of tools, the machines which are made to do the work of the tools are a sealed book and a mystery to him. If he goes to a machine shop, they will, perhaps, take him on the footing of a tool, and set him to doing over and over, forever and ever, one particular thing; that is, if he does not disgust the superintendent by letting his machine do some mischief, which in his ignorance he is likely enough to do. He is a stranger in a strange city, in a perfeet Babel maze of buzzing and clanking, the meaning of which is all Greek to him.

But suppose he had first been let into my friend Ruggles's proposed school-shop, furnished with a considerable variety of tools and machines, and encouraged to try his ingenuity in using them to make something to make the various parts and put them together. He does not become perfect with any