Ninety-seven in every hundred boys who graduate from the public schools and embark in mercantile pursuits fail. Suppose ninety-seven in every hundred watches made in the American watch factories should prove to be worthless. The watch companies would, no doubt, soon be in the hands of the sheriff. But, as a matter of fact, the Elgin National Watch Company, for example, makes twelve hundred watches a day, and each and every one of them is an almost perfect time-keeper.
There is, then, no such failure of the arts as there is of justice; no such failure of mechanics as of merchants; no such failure of locomotives and watches as of legislation. It follows that the education of artisans is better, more scientific, than that of merchants, judges, lawyers, and legislators. And this is a very significant fact when it is considered that the State does much for education in belles-lettres and scarcely anything for education in the arts and sciences.[62]
[62] The reason why statutes fail more frequently than steam-engines and bridges is not wholly because the legislator has to deal with human nature and the mechanic with inanimate matter. Steam and electricity are subtle forces, but man has quickly mastered them and successfully applied them to a variety of uses.
It is not to the interest of any one that the machinist should make a defective locomotive, for example; but it is often to the interest of some one that the legislator should enact vicious laws. Vicious statutes are enacted with a design to injure the public in order that certain individuals may be benefited thereby.
If the mind should act as honestly in legislation as the hand does in construction, statutes would not have to be repealed yearly.
We have fallen into the habit of regarding education as a polite accomplishment having very little to do with the real business of life; but this is not the fact. Education begins in the cradle and continues through life; and it makes the man what he is. If he goes to the penitentiary it is his education that sends him there. If he is sent to the General Assembly of the State or to the Congress of the Nation, and there helps to enact vicious laws, it is his education that is responsible for such laws. If the man as a citizen sells his franchise at the polls, or his vote in the legislative hall, for money, it is the education he has received that is responsible for his baseness.
It will be said that the explanation of the greater apparent accuracy of the work of the hand is to be found in the fact that it operates upon matter while the mind deals with metaphysical subtilties. The contention will not be that mind is less plastic than matter, but that it is more difficult of comprehension. But how do we know this to be the fact? Where has the experiment been tried of honest contact mind with mind? It was not tried by the ancients. It is not on trial in any part of the world to-day. There is, hence, no place in which to seek evidence as to how mind would act upon mind if treated honestly, as matter is treated by the hand. But if the quality of selfishness is eliminated, there will be no difficulty in bringing all minds to an agreement, as the parts of a watch are brought into harmonious and useful action. And it is through the hand that this beneficent union is destined to be effected; for the hand is the source of wisdom, which is simply the power of discriminating between the true and the false.
CHAPTER XX.
AUTOMATIC CONTRASTED WITH SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION—Continued.
The Training of the Merchant, the Lawyer, the Judge, and the Legislator contrasted with that of the Artisan. — The Training of the Merchant makes him Selfish, and Selfishness breeds Dishonesty. — Professional Men become Speculative Philosophers, and test their Speculations by Consciousness. — The Artisan forgets Self in the Study of Things. — The Search after Truth. — The Story of Palissy. — The Hero is the Normal Man; those who Marvel at his Acts are abnormally Developed. — Savonarola and John Brown. — The New England System of Education contrasted with that of the South. — American Statesmanship — its Failure in an Educational Point of View. — Why the State Provides for Education; to protect Property. — The British Government and the Land Question. — The Thoroughness of the Training given by Schools of Mechanic Art and Institutes of Technology as shown in Things. — Story of the Emperor of Germany and the Needle-maker. — The Iron Bridge lasts a Century, the Act of the Legislator wears out in a Year. — The Cause of the Failures of Justice and Legislation. — The best Law is the Act that Repeals a Law; but the Act of the Inventor is never Repealed. — Things the Source and Issue of Ideas; hence the Necessity of Training in the Arts.
There is a cause for the failure of the merchant, the lawyer, the judge, and the legislator, as well as for the success of the artisan. And the cause must be sought in the courses of training, respectively, of the two classes. Let us assume that the artisan and the merchant, the lawyer, the judge, and the legislator, graduate at the same time from the public high school, or from Harvard or Yale. The merchant at once begins to trade, to buy and sell. He concerns himself with things only as they have a value, either naturally arising from the law of demand and supply, or arbitrarily imposed by circumstances. His consideration of the relations of things is confined to the single question of the percentage of profit which may accrue to him from traffic in them. These are subjective processes of thought, and the merchant becomes absorbed in them to the exclusion of all other topics. It goes without saying that he becomes intensely selfish. The struggle is one of mercantile life or death—ninety-three to ninety-seven in a hundred die; three to seven survive.