The difficulty does not lie in any lack of training for manual tasks. We have never had so many people with hands trained to construct buildings and machinery, to set type, and to till soil to the best advantage. The schools have been training people for this kind of work long enough so that several graduating classes have been emptied out into the arena of the world’s life. The number is constantly increasing. Yet the shortage seems to grow. The trouble seems to root in a certain mistaken attitude toward labor. Our people do not find it easy to get over the notion that gentlemen do not labor with their hands. The idea persists, in spite of all the wealth of our philosophy to the contrary, that a certain aristocracy inheres in idleness. People are ashamed to be seen in their working clothes, and if anyone comes upon them when they are engaged in some manual task, they are prone to make excuses. They seem to feel that they have been overtaken in a fault. Parents, trained in the ways mentioned, are partially responsible. Many of them go on in the path of error, despite the fact that they realize their mistaken attitude. Their solicitude for their children impels them, and it often impels them to courses that are not best for the children themselves. Just the other day I heard a mother say that she realized the need of the world for workers, and that she realized the benefits of work to the individual. Yet she could not bring herself to feel willing that her two sons should spend their lives working with their hands. “I cannot help wanting them to prepare for some line of work that will be easy and dignified,” she said. So the story has been through the years. So long as this is the motive from which parents send their sons and daughters to school we can hardly expect any great change in the situation. A certain notion persists that education and work are incompatible. The assumption is that something is wrong when an educated man is seen employed at something involving physical exertion. The other day a friend told me that he had just learned a strange thing. In a certain nearby city, he said, a graduate of the state university and of a well-known law school was working as a motorman on a street car. Perhaps something had gone wrong in the case of this man. The wages now paid to street car motormen compare so poorly with the money made by a successful lawyer that one is naturally led to this suspicion. At the same time, however, there is no reason why educated men should despise such work as that of a motorman. Neither is there any reason why the position of a motorman should not be made attractive to men of the highest grade.