C.—PERVERSION.
The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect tendency of that caste spirit which has for ages fostered the antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children of toil that a Sudra was not permitted to approach a priest without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.
The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast by [[79]]constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him? You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the same Ritter who would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by [[80]]highway robbery. The princes of the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for secular concerns.
That sort of other-worldliness still seems to bias our plans of education. Colleges that would fear to lose prestige by devoting a few minutes a week to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens of hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical miracle-monger. Mechanical mastership (after all, the basis of all science) is denied a place among the honorable “faculties” of our high-schools. Fashionable parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of a boy who should visit joiner-shops and smithies, instead of following his aristocratic friends to the club-house. They would bewail the profanation of his social rank, if he should accept an invitation to impart his skill to the pupils of a mechanical training-school; but would connive at the mental prostitution of a young sneak who should try to reëstablish a sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers of a mythology-school.