The first step in rectifying an error is to probe and analyze it, so as to discover its real nature and dimensions, and the inquiry at once arises, Were those six hundred men really educated, or had part of their powers, and perhaps the powers best worthy of cultivation in each individual case, been ignored, or neglected through giving undue attention to the so-called purely "intellectual faculties"?
It may be said that this great army of the unemployed ought to disperse, and betake themselves to the abandoned farms that are crying out for owners and cultivators; but they would be just as helpless and unadapted there, for the simple reason that the taste and skill for farming need to be acquired in youth, and these poor creatures are best described by a word used by a countryman in apologizing for his wife's shortcomings as a housekeeper, "She means well, but she ain't noways faculized."
There has been a silent revolution going on for the last fifty years through which a "college education" has been deposed from its position of prime fetich among English-speaking people, and a new set of men—happily named captains of industry—are making their way to the front rank. Never was it truer than today that "new times demand new measures and new men," while it is being discovered that, even for the highest development of what are termed the purely intellectual faculties, book-learning and those studies that can be pursued in the isolated cloister or seminary are not all-sufficient. We are standing in the dawn of a new day, in which the term manual training is coming into universal use, and we are destined to hear much more of it and learn much more of its relations to the well-being of individuals and the body politic in the near future.
Between the years 1800 and 1830 a spirit may be said to have been moving upon the waters, in several countries at the same time, to effect a revolution in men's ideas as to the capacities for improvability in man, and the means by which these capacities can be developed, till at length, what may be called the gospel of culture was initiated. Twenty years before the French Revolution, Rousseau had put forth his Emile, a hand-book on education, which was one of those germinal, potent books that, though burned in France, was a seed that brought forth a hundred-fold when it was dropped into the minds of Pestalozzi in Switzerland and Goethe in Germany: it led them to study the human faculties in a new way—to take cognizance of the physical nature, as the concomitant if not the basis of sane and profitable action in the mind. Those men died nearly at the same time, and when England was on the verge of a mighty industrial upheaval; and as the torch of wisdom fell from their relaxing hands, it was caught up in England by men who were scourged to action through fear
