clerk or salesman, and looks upon work in the factory as the occupation
of ignorant and unsuccessful men. The schools do so little really to
interest the child in the life of production, or to excite his ambition
in the line of industrial occupation, that the ideal of life, almost
from the very beginning, becomes not an absorbing interest in one's work
and a consciousness of its value and social relation, but a desire for
money with which unmeaning purchases may be made and an unmeaning
social standing obtained.

The son of a workingman who is successful in commercial life, impresses
his family and neighbors quite as does the prominent city man when he
comes back to dazzle his native town. The children of the working people
learn many useful things in the public schools, but the commercial
arithmetic, and many other studies, are founded on the tacit assumption
that a boy rises in life by getting away from manual labor,--that every
promising boy goes into business or a profession. The children destined
for factory life are furnished with what would be most useful under
other conditions, quite as the prosperous farmer's wife buys a
folding-bed for her huge four-cornered "spare room," because her sister,
who has married a city man, is obliged to have a folding-bed in the
cramped limits of her flat Partly because so little is done for him
educationally, and partly because he must live narrowly and dress
meanly, the life of the average laborer tends to become flat and
monotonous, with nothing in his work to feed his mind or hold his
interest. Theoretically, we would all admit that the man at the bottom,
who performs the meanest and humblest work, so long as the work is
necessary, performs a useful function; but we do not live up to our
theories, and in addition to his hard and uninteresting work he is
covered with a sort of contempt, and unless he falls into illness or
trouble, he receives little sympathy or attention. Certainly no serious