and, in general, the use of the hands and eyes in productive labor has
been recognized as having good educational effects. The education of men
by manual labor was a favorite doctrine with Emerson. He had fully
developed it as early as 1837, and he frequently recurred to it
afterwards. In December of that year, in a course of lectures on Human
Culture, he devoted one lecture to The Hands. He saw clearly that manual
labor might be made to develop not only good mental qualities, but good
moral qualities. To-day, it is frequently necessary for practical
teachers, who are urging measures of improvement, to point this out, and
to say, just as Emerson said two generations ago, that any falseness in
mechanical work immediately appears; that a teacher can judge of the
moral quality of each boy in the class before him better and sooner from
manual work than from book-work. Emerson taught that manual labor is the
study of the external world; that the use of manual labor never grows
obsolete, and is inapplicable to no person. He said explicitly that "a
man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture"; that
there is not only health, but education in garden work; that when a man
gets sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper by
simply signing his name to a cheque, it is the producers and carriers of
these articles that have got the education they yield, he only the
commodity; and that labor is God's education. This was Emerson's
doctrine more than sixty years ago. It is only ten years since the
Mechanic Arts High School was opened in Boston.

We are all of us aware that within the last twenty years there has been
a determined movement of the American people toward the cultivation of
art, and toward the public provision of objects which open the sense of
beauty and increase public enjoyment. It is curious to see how literally
Emerson prophesied the actual direction of these efforts:--