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evident reason that otherwise the consumers would produce it themselves, instead of buying it; it is the manufacture of raw material, the putting mind into it, that enriches a people.

From an agricultural community, the people of the United States must, of necessity, with accelerated strides become more and more a manufacturing people; such is the world's development that to be successful it is clear the manufactures must become more and more artistic, that is, they must possess the art quality.

The wearisome monotony of countless repetitions of machine made ugliness, will no longer be endured by a people who have once seen what infinite variety and beauty is possible, when Art inspires handicraft and idealizes industry.

In this fact lies our hope, for the essential quality of Art forever divorces it from machinery. The machine itself may be the embodiment of the profoundest, subtilest thought; may be a work of art in the truest sense; but the products of that machine,-save only as the term "machine" may be technically applied to the limited class of the simpler mechanical aids to expression; such, for instance, as the pen of the writer, the chisel of the sculptor;-must needs lack the very quality which the term "art," implies. The more wonderful the machine, the nearer automatic in its complex action, the less the art quality of its products; because, in the addition of mind to matter, the patient weaving of the thought into the fabric, the skilful hammering of some conception of strength, or grace, or beauty, out from the malleable metal; the careful chipping off the rude envelope of stone from the tender form which the eye of the inspired artist has seen there imprisoned in the marble; in each and all the multifarious processes known to Art, whereby the ideal is embodied in the real, the creative soul counts! The human worker is the one essential factor.

The man stands erect; differentiated by this single power of creative expression, from all other known animate or inanimate existences. By this one act, the artisan becomes the artist; the toiler a creator; the slave a freeman; thus work becomes joy!

"The labor we delight in physics pain" said wise Shakespeare long

ago.

In this world all men and women must work; it is the law of life, the only path of progress. The only choice given, is, shall your work be good work, work that you love, work that helps you and helps the world; or, shall it be bad work, slave's work-debasing, hopeless toil, such as now, for millions of men and women, robs life of all joy?

How shall the school children of this fifty millions of people be taught, so as to give them joy in their work?

What then shall be done? The rational remedy would seem to be the adaptation of the public school courses of study to the new condi tions, so that the needed training can be given.

It no longer suffices that the child can read his own language, it has become essential that he should also comprehend the universal language, the language of drawing; that he should readily read and write that language, that he should learn if possible to think in that language, so that he himself may be able to design and create, as well as to fit himself to carry out the designs and creations of others; more than this, it is desirable that his fingers, as well as his eyes, shall be trained, that he shall be familiarized with the use of implements, and shall be taught how to use them to the best purpose, for there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and the pains and time necessary to be expended in acquiring an education are greatly lessened if the pupil has to unlearn nothing. Can these new demands be met by the public schools? Undoubtedly they can.

This reply may be given unhesitatingly since it is a matter of history that England in 1851, found herself face to face with this problem of how best, and most speedily, to create a population of trained artisans to recover for her the supremacy she had unwittingly lost.

England solved this problem successfully. How did she do it? She did it by beginning at once to teach industrial art to the children, while at the same time she provided, by every conceivable method, for the improvement of the growing and adult artisans.

The history of this bloodless war is as interesting as, and far more instructive than, many a chapter of her history which details the stories of foreign conquest. England had then no such sufficient machinery at her hand as we in these United States now possess in our universal system of public schools.

And again it may be asked supposing that your wishes have been acceded to, and that the school children of the United States have been taught, as you desire, so that they are all more or less qualified to become producers in the artistic industries, where and how shall they find employment? Who is to buy the works they make?

In reply we may be permitted to also ask do not shoemakers wear shoes, and tailors garments? Do not carpenters live in houses, and bakers eat bread? Every new industry makes its own consumers, and

civilization, does it not reveal itself by the new wants it discovers for man?

Man the unsatisfied, ever craving animal, who, when life is assured, wants comfort; and, comfort once attained, demands luxury. Whose wants are as illimitable as is the immortality to which he aspires.

This great army of future producers of the beautiful results of art applied to industry, are also to constitute the great body of consumers of these articles. The child who has been taught in the public schools the value of drawing, the charm of artistic combinations of color, the ease with which the articles of common use can be made attractive instead of repulsive, will no longer be content to live in the midst of ngliness.

The Centennial Exhibition taught the people of this country how beauty enriches all the appliances of life; the study of drawing in the common schools will teach their children how things are to be made beautiful, and these thousands upon thousands of home missionaries of the beautiful will create every where such a demand for the element of art in all manufactures, that they will compel the manufacturers to seek to comply with this demand, or, to yield their markets to foreign competitors.

When the manufacturers look for the skilled workmen who alone can enable them to enter into this competition successfully, behold here are the youth from whom they can be speedily made, in the army of bright boys and girls, whom the public schools, by educating their eyes and fingers, have thus fitted to become self-sustaining producers.

In a far shorter time than was required in England, America can, if she so elect, step into the front rank of the manufacturing nations of the world.

The economic test is a just criterion. Whether training in industrial art will repay its cost to the community is a pertinent question; if it will not, then it ought to be condemned.

If I have given so much time to demonstrating the money value of this study, if I seem to have forgotten that Art "is the Goddess Great," and to have joined those who only see in her "the milch cow of the field," "Who only seek to calculate

Just how much butter she will yield,”

it has been in a willingness to meet objectors upon their own ground. We may perhaps think it a low ground, but it is, after all, by a sure instinct that the public demands of any innovation that it shall pay, pay

in the lowest, the pecuniary sense, as well as in the highest, the sentimen tal sense; for such is the consistent unity that pervades this ordered universe, that, that which is best esthetically, is best economically. If this study of industrial art is really what it is claimed to be, if it has a right to enter in to the prescribed course of our public schools, it must be because it will repay to the community all its cost; because it will enable the children to earn more money when they take their place in the ranks of producers than they could without it.

That it will do this, I submit, has been unanswerably demonstrated by the experience of England; so that, upon the ground of economical expediency, its right to become a part of the required curriculum of the schools, can no longer be questioned.

Assuming this point as settled, let us for a moment, consider the claims of this new study on other grounds. Let us look at its educating, refining influence.

Based as it is upon geometry, it gives exactness to the thought, as well as requires it of the eye and hand. Compelling the eye to close observation it teaches it to see, and behold a new world opens before the hitherto heedless child, who is thus endowed with the perception of natural beauty; a gift that will enrich and gladden all his after life. For him, there is everywhere, now first apparent, the exceeding and marvellous wealth of varied beauty which abides in the forms of external nature. The curving branches of the wide spreading elm or the drooping willow, the delicate leaves of the upspringing flower, the softened lines of the sloping hill side, and the grand masses of the majestic mountains, as they lift themselves sublimely toward the heavens, all these, have for him a meaning, and a joy, never before suspected. He has become apprehensive of the significance of form, and at once his eyes are opened on a new heaven and a new earth. His education in art progresses and he is, in due course, initiated in the mystery of color, he begins to observe colors, to discriminate tints, and, to his amazement, he discovers that all nature is vocal with these tell-tale hues. The clouds speak to him with a thousand tender or threatening tones, the sky appeals to him by day and by night; the spring softly whispers her coming, in those faintest flushes of color that make tremulous the boughs of the leafless trees, that had ever before seemed to him bare and barren; every variation of light and shade, every slightest change of hue, every subtlest blending of tint, has now for him a meaning and a charm ineffable. Day by day, during the long procession of the months,

he walks through palace halls hung with hangings more splendid than tapestries of Tyrian dyes; he gazes on forms whose grandeur and beauty mock the sublimest efforts of builder and sculptor; he looks upon colors, whose hues outglow the canvases of the painter, and defy the subtlest skill of his art.

What passages of eloquence have been uttered over the wealth of companionship into which he was ushered who had been taught to read; in whose hand had been placed the key that unlocks the garnered treasures of man's wisdom recorded in books; but what description of the beauties of nature can for an instant rival the reality?

Into what more august presence is he ushered, with what divine companionship is he endowed, from whose eyes the scales have fallen, and who has been taught to see the ineffable and inexhaustible beauties of the works of the Divine Artist? Life for him, henceforth, can never be lonely or ignoble, he is free of all the boundless domain of Nature!

This study, then, opens to the wealth of external nature on the one hand, on the other, it opens the halls of history, and rebuilds, to the youthful imagination, the temples and palaces, of the past.

The works of man appeal to the youthful aspirant for knowledge, as do the works of nature; he looks upon them with an intelligent eye, and they open to him their stores of knowledge. Medieval Europe, Rome, Greece, Egypt, Assyria and India, all appeal to him from the remote, speechless centuries.

Those historical forms of Art, those established orders of Architecture, which he draws upon the school blackboard, are so many windows, through which the student looks upon the past as from a watch tower. To know history is no longer simply to be familiar with what men of the past have said, but it is to see what they have done, what their builders builded, and their artists wrought.

Thus, then, this new study is the vestibule through which the aspirant may enter the grandest temples of knowledge. Opening both to a knowledge of the world of nature, and of the works of man, is not its claim to be included in any scheme of education, however elementary or however advanced, fully established?

There is one suggestion more. Is it not worth while to give to those whose destiny in life must be to work, that training which shall make them most effective, and which shall make their work a joy, and their lives happy and contented, instead of dark, gloomy and wearisome? In this life which is so brief, of which, at best, so little remains, will

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