In place of eighty-four hours we now work fifty-eight hours per week, a difference of twenty-six hours, and as an employer of help I am glad of it. We are not allowed to employ children at the tender age that was in vogue seventy-one years ago; as an employer of help, I am glad of that.
We get better pay for our services. There is at least an advance of two hundred per cent, and in many cases more than that.
More Opportunity To-Day.
We live in better homes; our houses are larger, better finished, and kept in better repair. When I was a boy, if we wanted a room re-papered or painted, or even whitewashed, we had to do it at our own expense. It is quite different now. Every village of any size employs painters and other help enough to keep our houses in good, neat, and healthy condition, while the sanitary condition receives especial care. Many of our employees have homes of their own, built with money earned in our manufactories—a thing almost unknown seventy years ago.
I have many times been asked if, in my opinion, the young man of to-day had as good a chance to make his mark in the business world as did his elders? My answer is—never since our Pilgrim Fathers landed on the shores of Plymouth were the opportunities for the young man's success greater than they are to-day. It is for him to determine whether he will be a success or not. The gates and the avenues are open to him, and it is for him to elect whether he will or will not avail himself of the golden opportunities awaiting him.
Such a comparison as Mr. Knight draws from his actual experience does the work of volumes of argument. That the span of one man's life could bridge extremes so widely separated is evidence enough that our country has made remarkable progress.
GIVING THE MIND ITS THREE SQUARE MEALS.
A Paper by the Late Lewis Carroll, in
Which the Desirability of Feeding the
Intellect Is Dwelt Upon.
The late Lewis Carroll was, first of all, professionally a mathematician, though few readers of "the Alice books" knew it. And his name, of course, was Charles L. Dodgson, and he wrote mathematical treatises. To the time of his death—he was born in 1832 and died in 1898—his readers hoped for more volumes like "Alice in Wonderland" or "The Hunting of the Snark," but Mr. Dodgson's literary output was small. The May Harper's reprints a hitherto unpublished paper from his pen, on "Feeding the Mind," in which he says:
Breakfast, dinner, tea; in extreme cases, breakfast, luncheon, dinner, tea, supper, and a glass of something hot at bedtime. What care we take about feeding the lucky body! Which of us does as much for his mind? And what causes the difference? Is the body so much the more important of the two?