PREVENTION OF CRIMINAL IDLENESS. 375 
manual dexterity brings us back to the consideration of our own condition 
in this respect. The school shops were discussed by the American Social 
Jeience Association as far back as 1877, in Boston, by a committee consist- 
ing of Wendell Phillips, S. P. Ruggles, Elizur Wright, Edward Everett 
Hale, and John Newell. In this discussion they say: ‘How shall we 
srain for the wide field of responsibility that lies before them, the children 
and youth who are to succeed us in this world, so changed by science and 
inventions ? >’ 
Says Wendell Phillips : 
«Now idleness is one of the first temptations to vice. Children should be taught how 
0 work, and, if possible, trained to love work. Seven out of ten who come out of our 
public schools would prefer a trade by which to make a living by the work of their 
hands, but hundreds leave school at fifteen years of age wholly unable to do anything 
for which any man would give them a dollar. And further, in my judgment, we have 
no right to take a man’s child from him and keep him until he 1s fifteen, or to induce 
2 man to trust his child with us, and then hand him back unable and unfit to earn his 
bread. We have done the boy and the city a harm rather than good. Education means 
FITTING man for his life ; we have rather UNFITTED than FITTED such a boy for the life of 
labor which is to be his destiny. Our system helps the literary class to an unfair evient 
when compared with what it offers to those who choose some mechanical pursuit. Our 
system stops too short ; and as a justice to boys and girls, as well as to society, we should 
see vo it. Its main features must be added to our public school system, which daily 
oecomes more unequal to the task it assumes.” 
Edward Everett Hale says : 
“ The great duty of the state is to make the most of every child born in the state. We 
BEGIN bravely on the broad system of public schools, but it must be remembered that the 
average Boston boy leaves school forever before he is twelve years old.” 
We wish the state to add school shops to its system, because the state 
san do it better than any private corporation. And if a child should 
snter a kindergarten at the age of three years, and remain in a connected 
manual-labor school, he would have at least a nine years’ training for 
work. 
But Mr. Hale continues : 
«The state has determined wisely that all large towns shall have LATIN and GREEK 
taught in the public schools, and shall prepare boys for college. It has determined 
wisely that they shall teach drawing in these schools, resolving to develop the hardly 
budding genius of art in our manufactures. Let it determine with the same wisdom 
not to be dependent on the workshops of other lands for the skilled workmen whom it 
must have if its great enterprises are to prosper.” 
I cannot but believe that so soon as the state throws the prestige of the 
public school system around its schools of industry, and opens them as 
freely as it opens its schools of Latin and Greek and the higher mathe- 
matics. we shall see boys of enterprise and ingenuity and quickness of