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MANUAL LABOR INDISPENSABLE.

381

The Board of Regents, as at present constituted, is an anomaly in the history of democratic institutions. It is virtually a self-perpetuating close corporation, managing a property already worth more than a million dollars, commanding an important and constantly increasing political influence. Already the skillful dispensing of patronage has made itself felt at Berkeley. What it may become in the future requires no illustration.

It should be remembered that the State is not only the trustee of the national benefaction, but that the people have freely given of their substance, over eight hundred thousand dollars, for buildings and the maintenance of the University.

Another hindrance to the prosperity of the Agricultural College of the University is the want of land upon which to carry out farming operations on a scale commensurate with the magnitude of this interest in California. Since the sale of nearly two hundred acres of the University domain, (see page 191,) it will be impossible to exhibit the varied capacities of this State for agriculture and horticulture on the present site, or to carry out a manual labor system which will judiciously employ and train the students for their work. In nearly every other Agricultural College in the country manual labor is made obligatory, and it should be in every College, upon this foundation.

No way could be devised to give a stronger or more lasting direction to the taste of young men and women for these pursuits, than their association as students in the labors of the horticultural school and the farm. Four years of practical and theoretical training of the right kind, of such a body of students as California is even now ready to furnish, would, in my judgment, prove an incalculable benefit. It is the proper function of the public school to train the young for a respectable position in the industrial state. The Agricultural and Mechanical College should complete this training; its diploma should have a money value, as a certificate of educated power. This cannot be done without means and appliances for the acquirement of skill. "This acquisition of skill requires physical labor, just as the acquisition of science requires mental labor. Hence, physical labor should be compulsory, in the same sense and for the same purpose that mental labor is compulsory, and in no other. As long as a student feels that he is gaining either knowledge or skill that will be valuable to him

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as a farmer, he will work in the field, or nursery, or shop, as cheerfully as he plays, and more cheerfully than many study.' What is the education of most of our students worth on graduation day? Many a commencement occasion has brought to me only a painful sense of the utter helplessness of the young men and women graduates to make a living. I have received scores of letters from students, one, two, and three years after leaving college, asking for advice, for positions, for help in making their way in the world; for their training had only fitted them for the professions, and these are overcrowded and full. Now, suppose this training had been industrial-equal in every respect to the other, but differently directed. As a skilled mechanic, as a foreman or manager of a farm, or farmer on his own hook, he can at once command sixty dollars a month; he has not to wait from two to five years to wedge his way into a paying practice. The wages of a young man from sixteen to twenty years of age are worth, including his board, at least thirty dollars a month, or the interest on $3,600, at the rate of ten per cent. If he comes out of college a skillful mechanic or farmer, he has doubled his capital; if he has only got ready to begin the study of a profession, he has in a strictly business point of view, sunk it in a venture which may or may not reimburse him after many years. If he has made the great and almost universal mistake of studying without a definite purpose or aim, without a definite occupation to which his efforts have been constantly directed, this is almost certain to be true. As President Anderson, of the Kansas College, says: "It is time for men to look the educational question squarely in the face, and to substitute common sense for traditional and groundless sentimentality."

We are now beginning to understand that a sound mind is not to be expected in an unsound or half-developed body, and even the purely literary colleges are encouraging competitive muscularity in a way that would have caused John Harvard and Elihu Yale to shake in their shoes. What is there more interesting in a boat race than in a plowing match? Is the power ignoble which is applied to the spade or the plane, and otherwise when it holds the ball club, or boxing glove? Is it so much greater an accomplishment to say horse in half a dozen languages, than to know how to breed and care for one, until the beast has become more than half human in his beauty and in

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telligence? Is all the verbiage with which our schools are loaded down until physicians are crying out against the murder of the innocents, so much better than "paying knowledge to future farmers, paying skill to future mechanics, self support and God-birthed liberty to women?"

Another thing for the farmers to consider seriously in respect to the necessities of agricultural education is, that we need one institution at least free from the temptations to college extravagence, where plain living and high thinking can be illustrated in all the appointments. Extravagant buildings, which in some States have cost more than the principal of the congressional grant, no matter how they are obtained, are undesirable for our purposes and work.

President Anderson, of Kansas, once a resident of the Golden State, thus pictures his ideal of the Agricultural College of the future:

Some day, and somewhere, there will be an agricultural college looking so much like the grounds and buildings of a prosperous farmer, who did his own repairing and manufacturing, that we of the present happening by, would mistake it for a little hamlet of thriving artisans, built in the heart of rich and well-tilled fields. Nothing in its appearance would suggest our notion of the typical college. Its barns, sheds, yards and arrangements would embody the idea of the greatest utility at the least cost. Its implements, stock, and fields would show them to be used for real profit. Its orchards and gardens would not only reveal the success of the owner, but, also, his full determination to enjoy the fruit with the labor. We would be quite certain that it was only such a farm-the best -the best specimen of the highest type-were it not for the presence of cheap, stone buildings, one or two stories, scattered among the trees; all of them more resembling mechanics' shops than anything else; some exactly, others, not exactly; and yet no two alike. One would be used for teaching practical agriculture, but would as little prompt our idea of a recitation room as the whole cluster would that of an imposing college edifice. While there would be seats for hearers, and a place for a speaker, yet the latter would most suggest a circus ring for the exhibition of short-horns, when short-horns were discussed; of horses, pigs, or sheep.; of surgical operations; of plows, harrows, or reapers. The walls would be lined with photographs of famous herds, working models of farm machinery, the grain and stock of cereals. Part of its surrounding ground would be belted with every variety of growing grasses; and another would be for the draft-test of implements, or the trial of student skill. In fact, it would look, and be so like an actual workshop of real farming as not, even in the remotest way, to squint toward the article generally yclept "scientific agriculture." The interior of another shop, a few rods distant, and equally inexpensive, with its grafting-tables, potting benches, pack

ing-room, working green-house, and, outside hot-beds and thrifty nursery grounds, would look so much like "gardening for profit" as to throw us completely off the trail of botany, as a pure science. Another would be a force shop, where light, heat, water, sound and electricity were made to reveal their laws, habits and effects, and to do their industrial work. The constant use of its appliances by busy students, in sacrilegious defiance of the rule, "Don't touch the apparatus," italicized with professional emphasis, would instantly satisfy us that there was nothing "collegiate" there, and that it was only a workshop where men had to become skillful workmen ! There would be a mathematical shop, so much like a counting and drawing room, no one could be surprised when it led into an inventor's and pattern-maker's room, and its winding up in a machine-shop. There would be an English shop, remarkably like a printing-office; and the "Printer's Hand-Book" of that day might strike us an admirable drill in the art of using the English language, as well as in that of sticking type-almost as good as a grammar! There would be a woman's workshop, where the pale Hortense, at heart a good deal more sensible, earnest, and womanly than society supposes, would strive for the bloom and "faculty" of Mary. The blessed Mrs. Grundy would be dead! And there would be a mason's, carpenter's, and smith's shops. Not a shop of them would cost $5,000; and some, not half of it; because they would be shops, warm, light, cheerful, but workshops-not requiring costly foundations and tall, heavy walls, not finished as are parlors, nor wasting space in broad corridors. And they would not have been fore-ordained by men of a previous generation, who, to save the lives of the best of them, could not possibly have foretold just what buildings such a college would need. As, in the process of its growth, a want had been felt, its shop was supplied; and each generation had footed its own bills. No! it would not look like our great colleges; but very remarkably like a nest of real educational workshops, where flesh and blood students acquired marketable skill for industrial labor. In it, drill in the art would have greater prominence than the stringing of facts on the threads of a system; and the requirements of the art would serve as a skimmer to lift the cream of science as needed. Knowledge would be shoved paying end first, and not everlastingly philosophic end first. For the world has gotten back to the history of its own experience, where art was the Columbus, discovering science. In it, educational common sense would have supplanted uncommon educational nonsense. And leaving it, the newly fledged graduate, as does the newly fledged "jour.," would at once earn a living. Such an Agricultural College would be in keeping with its object, with the requirements and genius of labor, with itself! And, too, it would be in keeping with a rich, broad State, carpeted by emerald grasses, belted by golden grain, clumped with orchards, moving with herds, clustering with villages, threaded by railroads, flecked with countless smoke-offerings from the altars of industry to the god of labor.

Some day; somewhere; somehow!

WOMAN AS AN INDUSTRIALIST.

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CHAPTER XXVII.

THE INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN.

"It is strange that a mother, educated as most mothers of the present day are, and who as wife and housekeeper has keenly felt her own ignorance of subjects that should have been taught, and her want of skill that might have been acquired, can be content to give her daughter the same unreal preparation for real life. And it is exceedingly strange that a father, long familiar with the distress suddenly wrought by financial changes, should religiously exclude from his daughter's education all knowledge of business, and every possibility of earning a woman's living, except at the needle, wash-tub, or piano."-J. A. ANDERSON.

WOMAN AS AN INDUSTRIALIST--THE FIELD OF DOMESTIC LIFE-HER VOCATIONS AS A PAID LABORER-HOUSEKEEPING AS A FINE ART-TRAINING SCHOOLS FOR WOMEN IN AMERICA AND IN EUROPE.

THE wise man in the Book of Proverbs put a high estimate on the good housewife. He insisted that, although many daughters had done virtuously, she excelled all. Yet, as he does not mention her by name; as we have Deborah spoken of for her wisdom, or Ruth for her comeliness, or many others made prominent by their influence upon the men of the period, we take her as the representative of a class, and know from the condition of the household arts in Palestine, that a good housekeeper was almost as great a desideratum in their days as in our own. So, also, the Greeks praised the women of the hearth, though we do not know their names; while we know how Aspasia beguiled Socrates with the graces of her conversation, and that Sappho took her seat by divine right rather than by a nomination among the poets. We know that neither in Greece nor in Palestine, at a period when poets and prophets abounded, was there a home in which any of us would have willingly lived for a single week; nor was there for ages afterwards such a recognition of human rights, of the dignity of womanhood, or the sacredness of the home, as could create a progressive home-building civilization. We have seen in the earlier chapters of this work how the ancient civilizations were built upon slavery, which bore equally upon the sexes. In following the historical development of industry, we shall find that woman has at all times borne her full share of the burdens of the industrialist, in addition to those which are hers by virtue of her organic constitution.

In considering the question of her education, therefore, we should cover the whole field of her industrial and special functions, and provide whatever is needed to give her the highest

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