A Nihilist lecturer recently stated that there are four hundred schools in Europe whose sole work is to teach the use of explosives. If the Old World is thus diligently sowing the seeds of discontent and rebellion, scattering some of them on our own too prolific soil, teaching that to brute-force alone can humanity look for the redress of its wrongs, how much more necessary it becomes to show the world that not in killing each other, but in helping each other to live, is the only possible solution of social difficulties. Unless the school can teach respect for labor, it will never be learned, and unless it is learned, and learned practically, the upheavals which of late years have disturbed society will grow in frequency and violence. Pericles, the great Athenian, describing the glory of the community of which he was so illustrious a member, said, “We, of Athens, are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes; we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.” But Athenian society rested on slavery, and the drudgery was performed by those who had no share in the good things which the citizens could enjoy. Our object should be to bring Periclean ideas of beauty, simplicity, and cultivation of mind within reach of those who do the hard work of the world. It can be done, and should be done, in a way to advance the skill and develop to the highest form of practical energy the skill of our handicraftsman and the manliness of his life; giving him an education that will enlarge his mind, improve his morals, instruct his industry, and thereby advance the power, the prosperity, and the peace of the State. The future will, practically speaking, belong to the technically educated, for no amount of natural “smartness” can compete with education in particularities. Raw material, forming a capital advantage, has been gradually equalized in price and made available to all by improvements in locomotion; and henceforth industry must be sustained, not by a competition of local and popularly designated “natural advantages,” but by the inexorable competition of intellect in all of its manifold and overpowering evolution. If a country would not be left behind in the race, if it desires to find any satisfactory solution for the deepest and most inscrutable problem of the time, if it wishes a complex and high civilization, to be maintained secure from all the dangers which the presence of unprosperous and unfed millions must bring upon a country, it should do its utmost to give a healthy and wide development to the industrial education of the masses; such systematic instruction as shall enable them to carry to the factory, to the laboratory, to the quarry, to the mine, to the farm, that scientific knowledge which is required to deduce practice from theory, to give dignity as well as efficiency to labor, and to connect abstract principles with the industrial pursuits of life; in a word, to provide an education