A Trade is better than a Profession. — The Railway, Telegraph, and Steamship are more Potent than the Lawyer, Doctor, and Priest. — Book-makers writing the Lives of the Inventors of last Century. — The Workshop to be the Scene of the Greatest Triumphs of Man. — The Civil Engineers of England the Heroes of English Progress. — The Life of James Brindley, the Canal-maker; his Struggles and Poverty. — The Roll of Honor. — Mr. Gladstone’s Significant Admission that English Triumphs in Science and Art were won without Government Aid. — Disregarding the Common-sense of the Savage, Legislators have chosen to learn of Plato, who declared that “The Useful Arts are Degrading.” — How Improvements in the Arts have been met by Ignorant Opposition. — The Power wielded by the Mechanic.

The young man with a mechanical trade is better equipped for the battle of life than the young man with a learned profession. The prizes may not be so dazzling, but they are more numerous, and they are within reach. The skilled mechanic, with industry and prudence, is sure of a cottage, and the cottage may grow into a mansion, while the man of letters struggles so often in vain to mount the steps of a palace. The railroad, the telegraph, and the steamship exert a more potent influence upon the destinies of mankind than the lawyer, the doctor, and the priest. The giants, steam and electricity, which bear the great burdens of commerce, have to be harnessed to enable them to do their work; and to make this harness, the furnace, the forge, and the shop are brought into requisition. The railroad alone taxes to the utmost nearly every department of the useful arts. To the construction of the passenger-coach, for instance, more than a hundred trades contribute the varied cunning and skill of their workmanship.

This is the age of steel, and he who knows how to mould the king of metals into puissant forms has his hand nearest the rod of empire. Who would not rather be able to construct a Corliss engine than learn the trick of drawing a bill in chancery?

There was a time, not long ago, when inventors and discoverers were little recognized and poorly compensated for their splendid achievements. But that time is past. The book-makers of to-day are groping about the old shops where the inventors of last century worked, and the cottages where they lived, in order to tell the simple story of their lives, and write their names in the temple of fame. Huntsman, who emerged from long seclusion over the furnace and crucible, and presented to his fellow-workmen a piece of steel which rivalled that of old Damascus, and drove from the British markets all other steels—how resplendent his name is now! How every incident in the life of Watt is sought for—his struggles, his disappointments, and his final success! And so of Mushet, Neilson, Bramah, Maudslay, Clement, Murray, Nasmyth, Stephenson, and Fulton. When Watt had devised his engine he found no workmen expert enough to make it. Then Maudslay, Clement, and Murray invented automatic iron hands and fingers, and endowed them with almost human intelligence, and far more than human precision, and Watt’s difficulty was removed.

The “greasy mechanics” did more to hasten the world’s progress in a century—1740 to 1840—than had been accomplished up to that time by all the statesmen of all the dead ages. But those heroes of the workshop had none of the opportunities afforded by the manual training school of the present age. They toiled many hours each day for a shilling or two, and lived in stuffy hovels, and puzzled over the a b c of mechanics by the light of a tallow-candle. Some of them gained fortunes, while others were robbed of the fruits of genius, and slept in unknown graves; but all their names are treasured and honored now. The world moves, and in this age it moves always toward a higher appreciation of the value of the useful arts. This country is destined to become a vast workshop, and in this workshop the best energies, the strongest vital forces of the American people are eventually to be exerted. How necessary, then, to educate the hands as well as the brain of the youth of the country.[E8]

Mr. Smiles, in his “Lives of the Engineers,” has shown us the true springs of English greatness. In telling the story of the struggles and triumphs of the canal-makers, the bridge-builders, the coal-miners, the millwrights, the road-makers, the harbor and dock makers, the ship-builders, the iron and steel makers, and the railway-builders—in telling this story of persistence, of nerve, and “pluck,” he has sketched the career of the real heroes of English progress. A brief sketch of the life of James Brindley will serve to show how these noble men wrought, how they suffered, and how they conquered.

James Brindley was born in 1716. His parents were poor. His father was a ne’er-do-well. His mother taught him to be honest and industrious. James worked as a common laborer till he was seventeen years of age. In 1733 he became a millwright’s apprentice—bound for seven years. He was a dull boy, learning slowly, but before the end of his “bound” term he became the best workman in the neighborhood. He helped the now celebrated Wedgwoods out of a difficulty by inventing and constructing flint-mills for their works. He invented and constructed pumps for clearing the Clifton coal-mines of water—an entirely new device that opened coal chambers which had long been completely drowned out. His compensation for this class of work—the work of genius—was two shillings a day!

In 1755 he built a silk-mill, in which he made several important improvements in machinery, etc. But this man, who possessed inventive genius of a high order and large executive ability, could neither write legibly nor spell correctly, and his charge for almost inestimable services was still, in 1757, only two to four shillings a day. His struggles to improve the steam-engine form a curious chapter in the story of his life. It was to him that the Duke of Bridgewater owed his success in canal-making.

The duke was born in 1736. He was a weak and sickly child, his mental capacity being apparently defective to a degree sufficient to debar him from his inheritance of the family title and estates. An affair of the heart which resulted unfavorably rendered him morose, and changed his whole course of life. He abruptly quitted the race-track, where he had condescended even to play the rôle of “jockey,” and turned his attention to the improvement of his estates. They contained coal deposits, which he undertook to develop through cheapening transportation, and Brindley became his engineer. His first canal, consisting largely of aqueducts, was called “Brindley’s castle in the air,” and his “river hung in the air.” It was this “river hung in the air”—the first English canal—that made the Manchester of to-day possible. Another canal enterprise of the duke cost more than a million dollars—that connecting Liverpool with Manchester. This latter canal yielded £80,000 per annum income, and it was constructed by Brindley at a salary of 3s. 6d. a day!

Brindley was obstinate, and often quarrelled with his employer about the methods of construction of great works; and what is more, the duke always yielded. He humbly submitted to every demand made by his engineer except a demand for compensation. Brindley’s “wage” rate during the many years occupied in the duke’s great canal enterprises was 3s. 6d. per day. This, at all events, is the price named by Smiles in his life of Brindley. In a note to the work it is, however, stated that his stipulated pay was a guinea a day. It is agreed on all hands, however, that whatever the rate agreed upon was, Brindley was not paid, and that his heirs were begging unsuccessfully for his just dues long after his death. In a word, Brindley’s honor as an engineer being at stake, and it being dearer to him than any money consideration, he worked for nothing rather than allow the enterprise to fail. And the duke was parsimonious enough to take the engineer’s services for nothing, and his heirs were mean enough to refuse payment for such services when demanded by his widow.

In a literary point of view Brindley was ignorant, but in no other respect. This was said of him by one of his contemporaries:

“Mr. Brindley is one of those great geniuses whom Nature sometimes rears by her own force, and brings to maturity without the necessity of cultivation. His whole plan is admirable, and so well calculated that he is never at a loss; for if any difficulty arises he removes it with a facility which appears so much like inspiration that you would think Minerva was at his fingers’ ends.”[33]

The life of Brindley is typical of a score of biographies presented in the “Lives of the Engineers,” among which the following are especially worthy of mention: William Edwards, John Metcalf, John Perry, Sir Hugh Myddelton, Cornelius Vermuyden, Andrew Yarranton,[34] Andrew Meikle, John Rennie, John Smeaton, Thomas Telford, William Murdock, Dr. D. Papin, Thomas Savery, Dud Dudley, Matthew Boulton, and William Symington. These, and their natural coadjutors, the discoverers of new forces in nature and the inventors of new things in art, the iron-workers and tool-makers—these are the great names in English history. They are the names without which there would have been no English history worth writing. Mr. Gladstone once said of them, naming Brindley, Metcalf, Smeaton, Rennie, and Telford, “These men who have now become famous among us had no mechanics’ institutes, no libraries, no classes, no examinations to cheer them on their way. In the greatest poverty, difficulties, and discouragements their energies were found sufficient for their work, and they have written their names in a distinguished page of the history of their country.”

The admission of Mr. Gladstone that the great achievements of these heroes of invention and discovery were won without any aid whatever, either from the government or the people of England, is a pregnant fact. It is the key-note of this work, the reason why it is written and published.

The neglect of the useful arts by all the governments of the world, from the dawn of civilization down to the present time, is an impeachment of the common-sense of mankind as shown in the conduct of public affairs. The civilized man might have learned wisdom from the savage, who is taught to fight, to hunt, and to fish, the brain, the hand, and the eye being trained simultaneously. But he chose to learn of Plato, who in the “Republic” says to Glaucon, “All the useful arts, I believe, we thought degrading.” And further in the same work: “We shall tell our people, in mythical language, you are doubtless all brethren as many as inhabit the city, but the God who created you, mixed gold in the composition of such of you as are qualified to rule, which gives them the highest value, while in the auxiliaries he made silver an ingredient, assigning iron and copper to the cultivators of the soil and the other workmen. Therefore, inasmuch as you are all related to one another, although your children will generally resemble their parents, yet sometimes a golden parent will produce a silver child, and a silver parent a golden child, and so on, each producing any. The rulers, therefore, have received this in charge first and above all from the gods, to observe nothing more closely, in their character of vigilant guardians, than the children that are born, to see which of these metals enters into the composition of their souls; and if a child be born in their class with an alloy of copper or iron, they are to have no manner of pity upon it, but giving it the value that belongs to its nature, they are to thrust it away into the class of artisans or agriculturists. And if, again, among these a child be born with an admixture of gold or silver, when they have assayed it they are to raise it either to the class of guardians or to that of auxiliaries, because there is an oracle which declares that the city shall then perish when it is guarded by iron or copper.”[35]

So ingrained in the public mind has this contempt for the artisan and laborer become in the course of ages, that notwithstanding the fact of the admitted kingship of iron among metals, and notwithstanding the fact that without iron the world would almost sink into a state of barbarism, still the opposition to the introduction of tool practice into the public schools is violent, and most violent among those classes who would be most benefited by it. Pending consideration of a bill by the Massachusetts Assembly in 1883, providing for the admission of manual training to the public-school curriculum, an opponent of the measure said: “The introduction of the use of tools is only another attempt to deprive the poorer classes of a good education. It is simply an attempt to overload the course of studies in the schools so that children shall not learn anything; so that the poor may be made poorer, while the children of the rich having a good time in the public schools may have their thought and health preserved for higher or special education.”

This is a repetition of the old answer of the Inquisition to Galileo upon the announcement and defence of his great discovery. He was summoned to Rome, and “accused of having taught that the earth moves, that the sun is stationary, and of having attempted to reconcile these doctrines with the Scriptures.” Bruno had been driven to and fro over the face of the civilized world, and finally burned in the year 1600 for teaching the system of Copernicus. Having the fear of Bruno’s fate before his eyes, Galileo recanted, and promised neither to publish nor defend his theories. But his love of science overcame his fear of oppression, and in 1632 he published his “System of the World.” Again he was summoned before the Inquisition, which was destined forever after to torment and persecute him. He was driven to his knees before the cardinals, consigned to prison, and tortured to blindness. After his death in a prison of the Inquisition at the age of seventy-seven years, his right to make a will was disputed, his body was denied burial in consecrated ground, and his friends were prohibited the privilege of raising a monument to his memory in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence.

Eighteen hundred years ago a Roman emperor refused to sanction the use of improved machinery in the prosecution of a great public work, on the ground that it would deprive the poor of employment.

In 1663 a Dutchman erected a saw-mill in England, but the hostility of the workmen compelled its abandonment. More than a hundred years elapsed before the second saw-mill was put in operation in England, and that was destroyed by hand-sawyers.

The Flemish weavers who introduced improved weaving machinery into England in the seventeenth century were met by protests. One of these protests, addressed to Parliament, represented that the Flemish weavers had “made so bould as to devise engines for working of tape, lace, ribbin, and such like, wherein one man doth more among them than seven Englishe men can doe, so as their cheap sale of commodities beggereth all our Englishe artificers of that trade and enricheth them.”

A little more than a hundred years ago, in England, when the Sankey Canal, six miles long, was authorized, it was upon the express condition that the boats plying upon it should be drawn by men only.

Illustrations of the vis inertiæ of ignorance might be multiplied indefinitely. Ignorance reverences the past. Ignorance never doubts. Ignorance is content; perfectly satisfied with its own knowledge, if the paradox may be allowed, it never seeks to increase it. But it is suspicious. In every effort to enlighten it discovers a conspiracy to undermine. Incapable of the intellectual effort of inquiry, it stagnates, and regards as a deadly enemy those who seek to disturb the serenity of its muddy pool.

When labor was only another name for a state of slavery, to teach men to labor skilfully was merely to raise them to a little higher grade of servitude. Hence it is only at a very recent period that it has occurred to mankind to teach skilled labor in the schools. All educational systems, our own among the rest, seem to have been intended to make lawyers, doctors, priests, statesmen, littérateurs, poets. But this is the age of steel, the age of machines and machinery. Tremendous forces in nature have been discovered and utilized, and these discoveries and their utilization have so multiplied vast enterprises that the importance of the mere ornamental branches of learning is dwarfed in their presence. “This is the practical age, and an educational system which is not practical is nothing. We shall still have our Tennysons, and our Longfellows, and our doctors of abstract philosophy; but there is little time to sentimentalize with the poets or speculate with the philosophers. There is work to do.[E9] The mine is to be explored and its treasures brought to the surface; more and more powerful machines are to be constructed to bear the burdens of commerce; new elements of force are to be discovered and applied to the constantly increasing wants of mankind.[36]

On the subject of the demand for a more comprehensive educational system, Col. Augustus Jacobson says, with great force, “Youth is the expensive period of man’s existence. Youth produces nothing and eats all the time. If the youth is not trained there can hardly be a profit to mankind on his existence. As mankind is liable for, and bound to pay, his expenses, he should be so trained that he may repay them. He can only become a profitable investment by training. If he is left unskilled, the money spent on him is wasted. There is no profit on a whole generation of Spaniards or Turks. Mankind should be wise enough to reap the profit there always is in finishing raw material, by making human raw material into a highly finished product.”

There are millions of intelligent little children in the public schools of the United States, receiving, doubtless, excellent intellectual or mental training. But they are not being trained for the actual duties of life as the savage child is taught to fight, to fish, and to hunt. They are not taught to labor with their hands, either skilfully or unskilfully. They are not given instruction in any department of the useful arts, notwithstanding the fact that in the case of a vast majority of them the alternative of earning their bread by the labor of their unskilled hands, or resorting to their wits for a support, will be presented immediately on their entrance upon the stage of active life. The apprentice system gave skilled mechanics to England, and her splendid manufacturing establishments are the result. The trained English apprentice became an inventor, and his inventions and art discoveries studded the island with workshops filled with automatic product-multiplying machinery.

The savage of Australia in Captain Cook’s time could kill a pigeon with a spear at thirty yards, but he couldn’t count the fingers on his right hand. The Southern Esquimau turns a somersault in the water in his boat with ease. But his more Northern brother has no canoe, and is ignorant of the existence of a boat; he has no use for a boat, because the sea in the latitude of his home is frozen the entire year. The savage is taught what he needs to know in his condition, and is taught nothing else; hence his skill in the few avocations he pursues.

The civilized boy in school is taught many theories, but is not required to put any of them in practice; hence he enters upon the serious duties of life unprepared to discharge any of them.[37] It may be said that he is in real danger of the penitentiary until he learns a profession or a trade. “Of four hundred and eighty-seven convicts consigned to the State Prison for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 1879, five-sixths had attended public schools, and the same number were without trades.” It is noticeable also that during the same period “not five were received who were what are called mechanics.” In the penitentiary of the State of Illinois four out of five of the convicts have no handicraft. The fact that the skilled workman is far more likely than the common laborer to keep out of the penitentiary is a powerful argument in favor of joining manual training to the mental exercises of our common schools.

The general adoption of a comprehensive system of mechanical education in the public schools would quickly dispel the unworthy prejudice against labor which taints the minds of the youth of the country. The splendid career which this age opens to the educated mechanic should be made clear to the vision of every boy in the land, and he will see, in the tools he is taught to handle, the key not only to fair success, but to wealth and fame. Professor Thurston, President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, thus sums up the mighty power wielded by the mechanic:

“The class of men from whose ranks the membership of this society is principally drawn direct the labors of nearly three millions of prosperous people in three hundred thousand mills, with $2,500,000,000 capital; they direct the payment of more than $1,000,000,000 in annual wages; the consumption of $3,000,000,000 worth of raw material, and the output of $5,000,000,000 worth of manufactured products. Fifty thousand steam-engines, and more than as many water-wheels, at their command turn the machinery of these hundreds of thousands of workshops that everywhere dot our land, giving the strength of three million horses night or day.”[38]