such men in the late war, whom the responsibilities of command lifted from recklessness to sobriety and to whom it imparted a dignity and grace of manners and a pride of character which surprised their most intimate friends. The possession and exercise of power filled them with aspirations for a new and

nobler life.

Such men are measurably types of whole communities and races. There are common faculties and aptitudes which have been dormant in the masses through all the ages, and are now slowly awaking into activity with the spread of intelligence. The many who, through most of the world's history, have been held in vassalage, and made pack-horses for the few; who have served only to feed the luxury and the lust, and to gratify the cupidity and ambition of their self-constituted masters, have been advanced in our day, by the general diffusion of learning, to a participation in the privileges and responsibilities of business and government; have been prepared to project and execute colossal enterprises, by sea and land, which would have been deemed miracles by the magnates of the old days of arbitrary power; have covered the plains and mountains with waving harvests, and have filled the river valleys with the music of machinery; have rifled the earth of its hidden treasures and transmuted them into imperial cities; into the innumerable products of our practical civilization, and the splendid works of high art; have covered the earth with markets and multiplied indefinitely the objects of traffic.

Such and so great have been the contributions of education in the past to the estate of labor, and to education must labor look for the realization of its hopes in the future.

Great discoveries are ordinarily made by men devoted to science, but the countless inventions by which the forces of nature are made to do the work of man, and the productive power of labor indefinitely enhanced, are, for the most part, the work of practical men whose minds have been enlightened and quickened in the schools. Ignorance rarely makes any advance on the methods of industry. Progress must be secured by those familiarized by study and use with the laws of force and the principles involved in machinery. Such were Arkwright, Watt, Fulton, Morse, and all the great names in the history of invention. Not more than one in a thousand of working-men has been prepared hitherto by intellectual discipline to add anything to the agents, or the methods, of production, yet no man can estimate the debt which the world owes to this handful of discoverers and inventors. They have made impossible things easy; have substituted plenty for want; have multiplied comforts and luxuries a thousand fold; have measurably removed the hardships which brought premature decrepitude and old age; they have lessened the hours of toil and added to those of recreation and improvement; they have opened the world to commerce and multiplied its objects; they have imparted new beauties and perfections to the utilities of life, and increased national resources and pop

ular wealth. Could the whole force of intellect employed in the various manual pursuits of life be enlarged and inspired by study, how large would the volume of practical thought become; how thickly studded would the arch of our history be with the lights of genius, and how grand and rapid would be the march of progress. Working-men would then find little occasion to organize for their own protection, for they would be the acknowledged masters of society and would dictate its laws.

The secret of popular power is in universal education. A director in one of the extensive corporations for the manufacture of cotton in Lowell, Mass., stated to a Congressional committee, a few years since, that only forty-five out of twelve hundred operatives employed in their mills, were unable to write their names, and that the wages of the eleven hundred and fifty-five who could read and write was twenty-seven per cent. higher than the wages of those who could not. This illustrates a law. Estimates, based upon a wide generalization of facts, have shown that generally the labor of an educated person is twenty-seven per cent. more productive and remunerative than that of an ignorant per

son.

In the same mills were a hundred and fifty girls who had been teachers. The wages of these quondam school teachers was seventeen and three-fourths per cent. above the general average, and more than forty per cent. higher than the pay received by those who made their mark.

Some years since, the agent of another of the manufacturing companies in the same city imported a large number of workmen from England. They received but half the pay of the better educated native operatives and it was supposed they would excel them in skill, but they did not earn a living and were a total failure. All but two or three were dismissed in as many weeks.

It is true that foreigners are largely employed in those establishments at present because of the impossibility to get natives, but, except those engaged upon coarse kinds of work, they have either been educated abroad or are foreigners who came to the country as children and have enjoyed the advantages of our schools. But as it is, the quality of our manufactures has to be maintained by improvements in machinery.

It is generally believed by our people that foreign labor, especially in manufacturing and the mechanic arts, is superior to domestic. This is a mistake, made, I apprehend, by confounding educated labor with skilled labor.

That facility and accuracy of manipulation which we call skill, is acquired by perpetual repetition of one thing and arises from that division of labor which always takes place in densely populated countries where work is a drug, wages low, and food scarce. The lace and tapestry weavers of France and the trinket-makers of Japan and China have skill, but they are necessarily narrow, stupid and starved. They know but one thing and can do but one thing,

and when that ceases they die. They are useless for all other purposes of industry and for all purposes of social or public life.

Skilled labor is transmitted from father to son and treads its narrow round without thought of change, but educated labor is curious and inventive, seeking constantly to relieve toil and make its results more perfect and remunerative by improved methods and the introduction of new forces. When our countryman, Bigelow, would improve the carpet loom and was stupidly refused admission to an English factory, he bought a piece of carpet and studiously unraveled it, till he had invented a loom which superseded the English loom upon English soil, and has added immeasurably to the productive industry and wealth of our country. It is the forecast and insight of disciplined intellect, not brute muscle, which accumulates the treasures and wears the honors of the world. Centuries ago the sun-stained Hindoo first made cotton cloth, but to-day, a Yankee girl will spin as much as three thousand daughters of Delhi. Such is the spirit of an enlightened industrial population. They advance with the advancing years, and sustain the progress they have helped to create.

An intelligent ship-builder informs me that before our late war, we were able, by virtue of the superior working quality of our men, to compete successfully with the English in the construction of vessels, though we paid twenty-five per cent. higher for labor, by the day, than they. The difference in the cost of the same quantity and quality of work is far