When, however, statesmen or politicians, or demagogues or well-meaning labor agitators or leaders, insist that skilled labor should be kept out of the country, it is to the interest of the community to firmly, persistently and indignantly oppose any such proposition. Lack of skilled labor is the curse of the country. Because a man is employed on work which requires skill and experience is no sign that he is fully competent to do it. The tramps who bind the farmer’s wheat, the cast-aways and chance laborers who build some houses in the West, the riff-raff who are gathered together occasionally to work a mine, or sail a ship, or do the work of a plantation or a farm for a short season, are the most costly labor that could be employed, and a great deal of work supposed to be done by experts in the United States is almost as expensive. So long as we don’t allow young men to learn trades--and that seems to be the rule at present--we must have men who have learned trades somewhere else. Plenty of Americans can be found in New York city at half an hour’s notice who complain with real patriotic feeling that, while they would like all their own employés to be Americans, they cannot find a large number or even a respectable majority of natives who are sufficiently skilled to do the work for which they are called upon. The consumption of pianofortes, for instance, in the United States, is twenty times as great, according to statistics of trade, as in any other country of equal population in the world. But in going through a piano factory one might very quickly imagine himself in a foreign country. It is not that the manufacturers are all foreigners, for they are not, or that they prefer foreign labor, or that foreign piano-makers work cheaper than those of native birth, but simply because we have scarcely any of native birth, although this variety of manufacturing industry has been active in this country for nearly two generations. In many other of the mechanical arts the same lack of native skilled labor is manifested. The wall-paper printers, the engravers, the better class of weavers, and several other mechanical arts, which require the services of draughtsmen and colorists, are almost all obliged to depend upon men of foreign birth for their work. It is pleasing to realize that most of these foreign workmen are now naturalized American citizens and probably quite as loyal to the Union and the Constitution as any of our native-born operatives, but the probabilities are, that as they grow old or disabled, and have to be replaced, the new men must come from the same sources as the old. Between Americans not being allowed to learn trades, and Americans not being willing to learn trades, we are pretty badly off for mechanical labor unless we can depend upon foreign countries.