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bring about conditions which would make domestic service a dignified and desirable trade.

Opposition to Public Trade Schools

There will undoubtedly be serious differences of opinion between the various factors in society before our educational system is developed on the new lines sufficiently to affect the situation. Both employer and organized workers are divided on the subject of trade schools under a system of public instruction.

The manufacturer doubts the efficiency of workers thus trained. This doubt cannot be removed by argument but only by a practical demonstration of the quality of workmanship. The equipment and instruction should be such that a certificate from a public trade school would mean that its holder lacks nothing that his trade calls for, save the celerity which comes only by practice. However, there is nothing to hinder the inauguration of factory trade schools when an industry so desires. Organized labor fears that the public trade school will flood the labor market and increase the sharpness of competition for work. But, as Robert A. Woods has observed, "it is inconceivable that as a class school-trained workmen should not be even more jealous than others of all unreasonable encroachments upon their wage standard, and that they should not apply their additional training to the development of even more effective forms of labor organization than now exist."

In facing the vast problem of proper education in a democracy, all private and class interests must be forgotten in the interest of the social good. Undoubtedly the manufacturer will profit by having the public, through the trade school, pay for training his recruits and bear the cost of the material now wasted by beginners. To make the employer and not the child the chief beneficiary of such a system, to make the newer education play into the hands of great industrial interests, would be a perversion of a splendid opportunity. But while this direct benefit to the employer is acknowledged, the trained worker and society in general will reap the chief advantage if industrial training is properly directed. The trained worker will cease to be menaced by the helpless and ignorant competitor, many times the child laborer, now so often the potent tool of the employer. Moreover, the trained worker, together with society at large, will reap the constant advantage of having offered for

purchase in the markets, honest products. The community will be relieved of the burden, now so heavy, of that multitude of dependents whose helplessness arises from ignorance and utter lack of training for any useful occupation. Best of all, the youth of our nation, if there is placed before them the opportunity to learn some one handicraft in its completeness, can never be crushed to the level of industrial machines. The methods pursued in this educational revolution must keep paramount the necessity of enhancing our most valuable social asset, human virtue and intelligence.

I bring this topic before you not in the expectation of adding to the wealth of suggestions already available in the program of industrial education, but that you may know that the National Child Labor Committee is content with no partial program for the elimination of child labor. Prohibitive legislation and compulsory elementary education open the door of opportunity for youth, but the education must be of such a character as to help the child by its attraction and lead him into such fields of skilled labor that in the education of his own children compulsion will cease to be necessary.

ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF CHILD LABOR

BY CHANCELLOR JAMES H. KIRKLAND,
Vanderbilt University.

We have discussed child labor within the past two or three days from different standpoints and chiefly as an economic or a social question. This afternoon we propose to look at its ethical significance. It is to be noted that all economic questions have a tendency to run into ethical questions, and that very naturally, illustrating merely the general principle that life is ethical. If conduct is threefourths of life, then it is of small concern how automatic we make our actions from day to day; how much we develop ourselves into pieces of machinery; in the last sense, when we come to think about it, our actions are right or wrong, according as they are social or anti-social, are directed towards self as an end, or are directed toward the larger world that is outside of self. The old effort to divide life into two parts as sacred and profane has long been abandoned. We may not thus separate our days or our hours or our seasons, and we certainly cannot so separate the ordinary duties and activities. Even the ordinary labors of every-day life are under the sway of eternal laws.

The great economic problems of to-day group themselves largely around labor. These questions can never be considered from an individual standpoint. They are individual to be sure; they are private to be sure; and yet they are public as well as private, and they are social as well as individual. They concern the individual and they concern all society. They concern one group of citizens, and they concern the whole state. They are economic because they have to do with the material basis of society, and civic because they have to do with the foundations of government. They are business questions and yet they are in essence ethical questions. It is a common proverb that "business is business" and that proverb is used sometimes to discourage what is called sentiment in matters of this character. While it may be true that "business is business," it is in a larger sense true that business is ethics. The payment of debts is business and all business would be impossible without it,

yet the payment of debts is an ethical question and I suppose is about the most unpopular proposition that can be presented to any ordinary individual.

The great problems that group themselves around this labor question are the outgrowth of what has been called our commercial age, the outgrowth of that development of invention and discovery that has transformed human society within the past hundred years. This created the large manufacturing centers of the world and this created the wealth of the world; this has made steam and electricity the servants of man, has wrought one achievement after another, and transformed the very face of the earth as it has transformed human society.

Material Development More Rapid Than Ethical

I was reading a statement the other day that seemed very interesting. One hundred years or more ago, at the time of the application of machinery to industry, if some prophet could have foretold the extent to which all this was to be carried, could have seen how completely labor was to be dominated by these great inventions then coming to the front, that prophet would have dared to say, "Now at last is beginning the millennium, now at last human toil is ended, now at last poverty and unhappiness shall be banished from mankind." And yet John Stuart Mill has said that he very much doubts if all the inventions of all the labor-saving machinery in the world have lessened the hours of labor of any single individual. A great engineer said to me a few days ago, “So perfect is human machinery now that the power that is developed by burning a Sunday newspaper under the boiler of a great ship is enough to carry a ton of freight a mile." With that perfection of human machinery and human ingenuity, still there is more poverty and unhappiness and misery and division among men than ever before. All of this has kept pace, has moved right along beside our development in wealth, in science, in art. This leads men to think, it leads men to ask hard questions that they cannot answer. One thing seems to be true, and that is that human society has advanced materially more rapidly than it has advanced ethically. The driving power of human life has been a material one.

Our vital forces from a business standpoint have far exceeded the vitality and power of our ethical relations. We have made great

machines and we have cared for them, but we have killed men in the making; we have grown rich, but we have grown unhappy; we have builded great cities, but we have filled them with slums. and with tenement houses. The questions as to the conduct of society are largely business questions. Some of us remember when the Louisiana lottery was up before the judgment of the people of this nation, how hard it was to answer the argument that the state required the money coming from that lottery in order to run its government. New York State is wrestling with a similar proposition in the question of gambling, and whenever these great ethical propositions come up, the answer to them, nine cases out of ten, comes from the realm of materialism; from the low basis of commercialism. For that reason it is very good sometimes to go back to the ethical basis of life. Therefore I lay down two or three general principles that I think we may accept and the acceptance of which, in my opinion, will do something to clear the atmosphere in the discussion of this whole question of child labor.

The Measure of Social Wealth

The first proposition is that the nature and aim of human labor is not human wealth but human weal; that society is interested in well-being more than well-living; that the end of civilization and the test of civilization are not in commercial statistics, not in the populations of states, not in the amount of manufacture, not in the wealth per capita, but in the character of citizenship and in the strength of the manhood and womanhood of the people.

I do not suppose we could give accurate statistics with regard to the production of the silver mines of Laurium to-day, but the schools of the Greek philosophers and the little State of Athens still rule the thought of the world. Croesus does not cut much figure any longer in the markets of the world, but Socrates still plays a part. Our American life needs to take this lesson to heart.

We who boast of our citizenship; we who boast of the progress of our country, and who as loyal American citizens dream of the future that we shall complete in the march of events, we need to remember that our glory will not be in our population, that it will not be in Wall Street or in the strength of our banks, that it will not be in skyscrapers and the wealth represented by them, but if our glory is to be permanent it must be in the character of American citizenship.

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