“But some are born rich,” suggested Corny Minkfield.
“Then their means of support are provided,
but this is not the case with one in a hundred. The great body of our people have to earn their own living. The only real objections I have to the high-school are, first, that it unfits boys and girls for the humble labors of life; and, second, that it uses up so many of the years of the young in learning what does not directly help them in earning their own livelihood,” continued the captain.
“But what they learn in the high-school is a direct help to them in all the business of life,” suggested Mr. Darlingby.
“Boys and girls spend their time from fourteen or sixteen years of age, till they are eighteen or twenty, in learning Latin, French, German, literature, the higher mathematics, and such branches, when they might learn a trade, or obtain a knowledge of business. When they graduate, they don’t want to learn a trade, work on a farm, or do manual labor of any kind. They look down upon such occupations. They want to be clerks, if they are boys, or marry wealthy men, if they are girls. They must do something, if any thing at all, that is genteel.”
“There is a great deal of truth in that statement,” added Mr. Bentnick. “Boys don’t stay in
the country, and work on the farm, now as they did fifty years ago.”
“I had a curiosity, when I was in New York last spring, to inquire into the salaries paid to clerks and salesmen in dry-goods stores,” continued the captain. “So far as I could obtain the information, the average was not above ten dollars a week. Of course, some got two or three thousand dollars a year, or even double these sums; but I found that a great many young men worked for five or six dollars a week, and some for even less. Good mechanics earned from ten to thirty dollars a week.
“Why, a common laborer got from six to twelve dollars a week. While mechanics and laborers were in demand, there were multitudes of counter-jumpers, and other persons who wanted what they called genteel occupations, who could get nothing to do. In a word, our institutions of learning have fitted too many for the so-called higher grades of employment.”
“But sometimes the mechanics and laborers are out of work?” said Bolingbroke.