many's manufactures and commerce relatively insignificant and poorly conditioned, but the habits and occupations of her people were domestic and agricultural. Her natural resources and the economic capacity of her people, who had given no evidence of possessing any peculiar genius for industrial activities, seemed inadequate to provide for an increasing population. Under these conditions the individual genius of Bismarck, through direction of the ministry of commerce and industry, undertook the achievement of economic prosperity, and in this work he relied principally upon the institution and development of a system of practical education which should embrace the entire working population of Germany.

In the four decades which measure the period of her rise as an industrial and commercial nation, Germany has demonstrated that nations which depend upon convention, established prestige, or superior natural resources, can not compete successfully against a nation which systematically develops the intelligence and efficiency of her laborers, and regards the farm, the shop, and the factory as laboratories for the application of science to economic processes. "It can not be doubted," declares a recent writer, "that under equal conditions the competition of German manufactured goods with English manufactured goods would be impossible anywhere outside of Germany, owing to the unfavorable geographical position of Germany's coal fields and industrial centers. Germany is competing largely on account of her system of industrial education."

While in other countries the development of science has been academic, in Germany every new principle elaborated by science has revolutionized some industry, modified some manufacturing process, or opened up an entirely new field of commercial exploitation. In the chemical industries of Germany, it is stated that there is one university trained chemist for every forty work people. It is important to realize that the development of Germany's manufactures and commerce has depended not upon the establishment of any monopoly in the domain of science, nor upon any advancement of science within her boundaries more aggressive and rapid than that which has taken place in other countries, but primarily upon the practical utilization of the results of scientific research in Germany and in other countries. In this whole process of bringing science into practice industrial education is an important factor.

372. Vocational Education and National Prosperity (Report of the Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education, vol.1, pp. 22-23. Washington, 1914)

In this selection from the Report the Commission states well the new dependence of commercial and industrial nations on vocational education for their workers for national prosperity.

Our National Prosperity is at Stake

We have become a great industrial as well as a great agricultural nation. Each year shows a less percentage of our people on the farms and a greater in the cities.

Our factory population is growing apace. Our future as a nation will depend more and more on the success of our industrial life, as well as upon the volume and quality of our agricultural products. It has repeatedly been pointed out that the time is not far distant when our rapidly increasing population will press hard upon an improved agriculture for its food supply, and force our industries to reach out over the entire world for trade wherewith to meet the demands for labor of untold millions of bread winners.

In volume of output the United States leads the four great manufacturing nations of the world. More than a billion and a half of people outside of these four countries are largely dependent upon them for manufactured articles. "The rewards offered in this world trade are beyond comprehension. They are to be measured in money, in intellectual advancement, in national spirit, in heightened civilization." Yet we have only begun to invade this market, where we find our competitor too often in possession of the field and strongly entrenched against us.

It is true that we have a large foreign trade in manufactured articles, but of our exports a very large proportion consists of crude materials. German, French, and English exports represent on the average a much greater value in skill and workmanship than do those from our own ports. Less than one-third of the volume of our foreign commerce is made up of manufactures ready for consumption. A very large proportion consists of raw and semi-raw materials, such as lumber, cotton, meat, coal, oil, and copper bar, to secure which we have robbed our soil and the earth beneath our feet of the riches we have been foolish enough to regard as inexhaustible. The statistics of our foreign commerce show that the proportion of these raw products, in the total volume of our exports, has been declining during the past three decades, and that the maintenance and development of our foreign trade is coming to depend each year to a greater extent upon our ability to compete with foreign nations in the products of skilled labor, upon our ability to "sell more brains and less material."

The volume of our foreign trade has in the past depended upon the exploitation of a virgin soil and of our other natural resources. In this crude work we have had no competitors. Our profit has been the profit of the miner working in a rich soil. The volume and profitableness of our trade in the future, however, must depend much more largely upon the relative skill and efficiency of the vocationally-trained artisans of England, France, and Germany. Our products will find a

market in foreign countries only in those lines of industrial activity in which the labor is as efficient and as well trained as the labor of the countries with which we must compete.

The battles of the future between nations will be fought in the markets of the world. That nation will triumph, with all that its success means to the happiness and welfare of its citizenship, which is able to put the greatest amount of skill and brains into what it produces. Our foreign commerce, and to some extent our domestic commerce, are being threatened by the commercial prestige which Germany has won, largely as the result of a policy of training its workers begun by the farseeing Bismarck almost half a century ago.

France and England, and even far-off Japan, profiting by the schools of the Fatherland, are now establishing national schools of vocational education. In Germany, within the next few years, there will probably be no such thing as an untrained man. In the United States probably not more than 25,000 of the eleven or twelve million workers in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits have had an opportunity to acquire an adequate training for their work in life.

373. English Conditions before the first Factory Labor Act (Montmorency, J. E. G. de, The Progress of Education in England, pp. 66-68. London, 1904)

The following extract describes the pitiable conditions surrounding child life in England after the rise of manufacturing and before the passage of the first factory control legislation, and gives the more significant provisions of this pioneer law.

... Parliament, during the eighteenth century, had taken an intermittent interest in education, and had created, at any rate, a certain distinct power to charge the rates with the education of the destitute. But the closing years of the century saw the gradual reopening of a new social problem. The invention and introduction of machinery into certain districts of the North of England, involved the aggregation of large masses of people in those districts. This broke down the parochial school system, and, moreover, in the end, did away with all education, for parents and employers rapidly discovered the value of child labour in mechanical production. Not only were all available children drafted into the mills, but the destitute children of the great towns were purchased, under a system of indenture, by the manufacturers from the poor-law authorities. Sir Samuel Romilly declared, in the House of Commons, in 1806, that parish apprentices were often sent by contract from London to the Lancashire cotton mills "in carts, like so many negro slaves." Until the year 1816, pauper children under the age of nine years could be compulsorily apprenticed in pursuance of statute 43 Eliz., c.2, s.5. It was not until 1833 that it became unlawful generally

to employ in mills children who had not completed their ninth year, and this age was actually lowered by a year in 1844. Moreover, the Statute of 1833 reserved the case of silk mills, and until the year 1879 children from the age of eight years could be employed in such mills. This seems almost unbelievable. But the fact remains, and through half of the nineteenth century the country was face to face with the knowledge that an immense number of children were growing up as parts of a great industrial machine, without any knowledge of either religion or letters, - human beings brought up as beasts of burden; housed, fed, and worked. Old Mr. Bonwick, in his "Reminiscences" before referred to, tells us that when he was a boy it was pitiful "to see the boy chimney-sweep, shivering and half-starved as a work-house apprentice, driven by a brutal master to clamber up the steep. What dreadful stories I then heard of the poor factory children, forced, as mere babes in the wintry darkness, breakfastless, to the mill!" The intolerable character of the evil an evil of so profitable a character that both masters and parents rejoiced at its existence - awakened the conscience of, at any rate, certain minds in Parliament. It was felt that a generation was growing up that had no knowledge or appreciation of the forces that bind society together, no knowledge of home life, of religion, of morality. The future depends on the children of the present, and the outlook for the nineteenth century looked dark enough in the year of grace 1802.

On April 13th, 1802, a Bill was introduced into the House of Commons "for the preservation of the health and morals of apprentices and others, employed in cotton and other mills, and cotton and other factories." This Bill, slightly amended and improved, received the Royal assent on June 22nd, 1802. The state of the factory children may be guessed from the provisions of the Act. It directed the mill rooms to be whitewashed twice a year, and to be ventilated; it ordered an apprentice to have one suit of clothes a year, and not to work more than twelve hours a day, exclusive of meal times; it forbade work between nine at night and six in the morning; it provided that male and female apprentices should sleep in separate rooms, and not more than two apprentices should sleep in one bed; it made medical attendance compulsory in the case of infectious disease; it directed the mills to be inspected by visitors appointed by the justices, and ordered the children to be taught the elements of learning and the principles of Christianity. The sixth section of the Act runs as follows: "Every such apprentice shall be instructed, in some part of every working day, for the first four years at least of his or her apprenticeship. . . . in the usual hours of work, in reading, writing, and arithmetic, or either of them, according to the age and abilities of such apprentice, by some discreet and proper person, to be provided and paid by the master or mistress of such apprentice, in some room or place in such mill or factory to be set apart

for that purpose; and that the time hereby decided to be allotted for such instruction as aforesaid, shall be deemed and taken on all occasions as part of the respective periods limited by this Act during which any such apprentice shall be employed or compelled to work." Section 8 provided that "Every apprentice or (in case the apprentices shall attend in classes) every such class shall, for the space of one hour at least every Sunday, be instructed and examined in the principles of the Christian religion, by some proper person, to be provided and paid by the master or mistress of such apprentice." Church of England children were to be examined at least once a year by the clergyman of the parish, and presented to the Bishop for confirmation between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years. Moreover, divine service was to be attended every Sunday, and not less than once a month at an Established Church.

This reformatory measure was petitioned against in the following year by manufacturers and parents, and it was never enforced. Many generations of little seven-year old slaves were to be worn away in the mills before effective relief came.

374. The New Problem of Child Labor

(Giddings, F. R., From an Address on "The Social and Legal Aspect of Compulsory Education and Child Labor," before the National Education Association, at Asbury Park, in 1905)

The following short extract from the above cited address states both simply and clearly the new problem of child labor, as it has arisen since the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the factory system.

The educational problem and the industrial problem of child labor cannot be separated. This is true, whether every parent is permitted to deal as he will with his child, or whether he is compelled, as in most American Commonwealths, to withhold his child from gainful employment and to keep him in a school, or otherwise to provide systematic instruction for him, during certain weeks of each year. Child labor itself is a kind of education which, according to its nature and extent, may be consistent or altogether inconsistent with other kinds. The labor that American boys and girls had to perform on the farm a generation and more ago was often an invaluable discipline of mind and character, fitting them for self-reliant and useful careers quite as effectively as their meager school training did. Such labor did not necessarily unfit the child for the enjoyment of the highest educational advantages. Exhausting confinement in stores, sweat-shops and factories is child labor of an altogether different sort. It is antagonistic to the child's mental and physical development and it cannot be combined with any sound educational policy.