(e) The _mobility_ or immobility of laborers as a class acts powerfully upon the Supply of them at any one time and place, and consequently upon the rates of wages then and there. In some countries, notably in the United States, laborers as a class move from place to place with considerable facility under the action of Demand for personal services. According to the Census of 1870, 7,500,000 of the native population dwelt in other States than those in which they were born. Many of these, doubtless, had left their native region to obtain more fertile land, and many also to obtain more remunerative employment as laborers. The native American, more than most other persons, is not only willing to move from place to place in the hope of bettering his condition, but is also willing to change his occupation from time to time in the same hope. There is more freedom of movement locally, and less fixedness of occupation on the part of laborers and others, in this country than in any other industrial country. Even foreign immigrants here,--factory operatives, miners, and other laborers,--seem to catch after a while the spirit of the country in both these respects. There is one considerable advantage in all this, namely, competition becomes more uniform in all places, an unusual demand for laborers at any one point is easily met, and wages neither rise so high nor fall so low at special points as they otherwise would. But there are considerable disadvantages in all this too, chiefly these, the services of laborers floating locally or changing the kind of their labor can never become so excellent as service more _steady_ in place and time; and, especially, thorough apprenticeships, or whatever may be equivalent to these, are held in too little esteem by public opinion, and are too little requisite in order to obtain transient employment. To meet the obvious pressure of these disadvantages, an admirable device is now being hit on, namely, to introduce into our public schools something in the way of "manual training" for the various trades. Public institutions also, some of them on a great scale, as the Cooper Union in New York and a more recent munificent foundation in Philadelphia, have been established on purpose to train boys and girls both in eye and hand to render skilfully those artisan services of the various kinds which will always be in demand among men, and which have certainly deteriorated among us owing in part to the disuse of the old apprenticeship-system.