an equal training and opportunity to insure an earnest of unbounded success in establishing and maintaining the future eminence of the country in the world’s great field of human art and human industry. The question of manual and industrial instruction is not confined in its interest only to those connected with the organization of schools and systems of education, as bearing entirely on the development and activity of the whole circle of intellectual faculties, but it relates to a deep and far-reaching political problem that thoughtful statesmen contemplate with serious concern. Might not the spirit of cheerful domestic industry, which the extension of educated handiwork is calculated to promote, do much to correct the evils of intemperance, violence, and social discontent which are assuming such alarming symptoms? The moral influence it exerts might produce a revolution for the better and a well-ordered commonwealth of labor. The habits of order, exactness, and perseverance fostered by manual training have an incalculable moral value. The ranks of the unemployed and misery and crime are largely recruited from the ranks of youth who are without any adequate training to earn an honest livelihood. With a more general dissemination of the rudiments of useful trades and employments there would be secured a larger share to productive labor,--for it would put brains into it and make it alike more honorable and profitable. It would tend to remove whatever disadvantage has heretofore attached to industrial occupations on grounds of dignity and the niceties of the social scale. When young America is trained for mechanical pursuits under the same roof and amid the same surroundings as he is trained for preaching and pleading, when he is made to feel at school that the same distinction is to be earned by skilful doing as by skilful dosing, the necessity for all the more or less sincere, but very wordy, extolling of the dignity of labor, which employs so much of our energy at present, will be removed. And when the mechanic has acquired industrial skill, not at the expense of his mental training, but along with it and as a necessary part of it, the crafts themselves will assume the old dignity and importance which once they had, but which they have lost in these days of false and foolish artificial standards by which men measure each other. The units or grains of society are continually moving to and fro between the scum and the dregs, from capital to labor and labor to capital, from wealth to poverty and poverty to wealth. But rich and poor, professional and artisan alike, have a common interest in strengthening the bulwarks against the dangers that menace honest society,--against nihilism, socialism, communism, and all kinds of vagabondage. Educated industry is the talisman. The strength of the republican pyramid is in its base, and it is in the lower social layer that the true character of a country’s need in common-school education must be looked for.