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.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Neglected development, either of physical or mental faculties, avenges itself in ennui, modified, for the benefit of the poor, by the less monotonous [[81]]afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is a wholly abnormal condition, as unknown to the children of the wilderness, who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties, as to the truly civilized man, who finds means to satisfy that craving. Unemployed muscles, like idle talents, rebel against continued neglect and goad the sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of vice, and the father who thinks it a waste of money to invest a dollar in a tool-box may have to spend hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and gambling debts.
Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were rather rare in the prime of the North American republic, when nearly every colonist was a farmer, and every farm a polytechnicum of home-taught trades; but European luxuries introduced European habits, and our cities now abound with plutocrats who are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers laid the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred the vices faster than the refinements of wealth, and have become acquainted with ennui—
We lack the word but have the thing;
and thousands who would fail to find relief on the classical hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might imitate his landlord, who practiced sharp-shooting with a medieval hunting-bow till he could challenge the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison. In a choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is, indeed, clearly preferable to games of chance; but [[82]]to that last resort of inanity the traditional aversion to manual employments has actually driven thousands of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never sunk to the abject effeminacy of European cities, where physical apathy has become a test of good breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments a stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently, social prestige has to be purchased at the price of practical helplessness, of dependence in all mechanical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of hirelings.
Life-endangering accident may now and then illustrate the disadvantages of physical incapacity; a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that the saving influence of a swimming-school might compare favorably with that of the baptismal miracle tank; but the survivors will persist in relying on the vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity avenges itself in every waking hour, even of the wealthiest weakling, while the guardian-spirit of Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to the playground and follows them over mountains and seas.