methods of attaining industrial efficiency, and as the schools have
played the leading part in the attainment, the German system of
industrial education, private business may argue, should be given for
patriotic reasons full opportunity in the United States. If the German
system were introduced here, of course it is not certain that it could
deliver wage workers more ready and servile, less single-purposed
in their industrial activity than they are now. It was in Germany a
comparatively simple matter for the schools to make over the children
into effective and efficient servants, for, as Professor Veblen
explains, the psychology of the German people was still feudal
when the modern system of industry, with its own characteristic
enslavement, was imposed, ready-made, upon them; the German, people
unlike the Anglo-Saxon had not experienced the liberating effects of
the political philosophy which developed along with modern technology
in both England and America.[A]

[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen.--Imperial Germany and the Industrial
Revolution.]

First, then, it is not certain that the system of German industrial
education would succeed; and, second, if it did succeed it is not the
sort of education that America wants.

America wants industrial efficiency, it must have efficient workers if
it holds its place among nations, and American people will prove their
efficiency or their inefficiency as they are capable of using the
heritage which industrial evolution has given the world. But what
shall we use this efficiency for? For the sake of the heritage? For
the sake of business? For the sake of Empire?