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ed in our midst, and seems to increase and multiply and overrun the land with as much fecundity as the rabbit which is devouring the sheep pastures in Australia-the Australians indeed have rather the best of it as they can eat the rabbit, but it would puzzle the hungriest mechanic to dine off a steam engine.

It is true, that until lately political economists have been able to show that so far from the employment of machines diminishing the demand for labour, it has increased it. Railways have employed masses of men to build them, and numbers are still employed to manage them and to convey to and fro millions of people who stayed at home like vegetables, in the good old times. Sewing machines employ thousands of women in making innumerable furbelows that were not thought of in the days of handstitching. Men wear two suits of clothes whose fathers had scarcely one, and machine-made boots cover feet that often used to go bare. Machines too wear out or are super seded by new inventions and have to be replaced; people live in larger houses and have more furniture; wants of all kinds have grown with the increased facility and cheapness of supply.

Still there does seem to be a limit to the possibility of consuming more than a certain quantity of anything, and we appear already to have almost reached it, while the capacity for supply is in its infancy. We may live luxuriously, but at last we cannot eat any more, and we cannot wear out any more clothes or more boots and shoes than we do; the Hottentots won't wear flannel waistcoats if they are ever so cheap. Railroads are made almost everywhere, saw mills make more lumber than can be used up, and the warehouses are full of goods even with manufactories working half time. To make money or do business the manufacturer must undersell his neighbour, and cheapen production, i.e., improve his machines so as to make them do more

with less cost of wages-his obvious remedy is to increase production while employing fewer hands, and the effect is an increase of the general distress.

The brain power of the world has been intent upon making and perfecting automata to do every kind of work, and the success has been magical; the face of the globe has been transformed, but-the weakest goes to the wall. The machine doing the work of hundreds of men is the property of the capitalist, and earns for him the wages of the supplanted workmen. The colossal fortunes of to-day, outside of the landed aristocracy, belong either to manufacturers or to the money lenders, who have absorbed the manu facturer, machine and all, while the supplanted workman starves or is pauperized by charity, and the dangerous classes continually increase.

The workman too has not only been supplanted in his work by the use of machines, but his position has been lowered; from doing the work aided by a machine, he has become the slave of the machine, waiting upon it and tending it with coals and water-the finer work is done for him and he has lost the tasteful skill of hand that belonged to the old artizan. Such noble work as was done of yore by the hand of man can hardly be done at all now, and we have in its place a cheap, monotonous, mechanical imitation. In perfecting the automaton, we have neglected the infinitely finer and more delicate machine, the living man himself.

Is it not time that the artizan should now receive attention, and that at least as much interest should be taken in training him for excellent hand work, as is displayed in perfecting engines for cheap machine work? People of wealth, leisure and taste are beginning to tire of mechanical reproductions, which are necessarily common, cheap and deficient in that subtle quality, charm, and variety, that comes only from the human hand, skilfully directed. For man is like his

Creator in this, that every work of his hand is unique. He cannot, if he will, make two things exactly alike. You may as well expect to find two leaves of a tree, two pebbles on the beach, or two grains of sand exactly similar, as two works without a difference from the hand of man. Originality to some extent, and increasing with the development of his intelligence, is stamped by his Maker upon every man and upon everything that he does.

To develop the intelligence, cultivate the taste and train the hand and eye to skilful work, is art education ; and we not only owe it to the artizan to give him this education and to lift him from below the machine, to his rightful place above it, but it is our interest to do so; it is false economy to leave unused our most precious material, and it is worse than folly to allow the talent and energy, which might be most profitable to the country, to become in helpless idleness a destructive force.

How best to impart practical culture (technical education) is one of the great questions that civilized countries are trying to solve, and it derives no little of its importance from the tacit acknowledgment, that upon it depends wealth and commercial supremacy. England's system of art education was born of this commercial necessity, and within the last quarter of a century it has enabled her to surpass in the taste of her designs, as well as in the skill of her workmanship, all her rivals. Her progress was virtually acknowledged by the French Government, who in 1863, appointed an Imperial Commission to discover the cause. This commission reported in effect that the advance was due to the teaching of drawing in public schools, and to the establishment of normal art schools and industrial museums. These words are contained in the report of the commission:

'Among all the branches of instruction, which in different degrees, from the highest to the lowest grade, can

contribute to the technical education of either sex, Drawing, in all its forms and applications, has been almost unanimously regarded as the one which it is most important to make common.'

Professor Smith in the paper already mentioned, quotes also from the report of the French Commission on the educational system of the United States, at the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876:

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Scarcely six years ago, Massachusetts introduced regular instruction in drawing, and the Northern and Western States are rapidly following her lead. If the last Paris Exposition revealed great advances in English industry, due to the Art movement developed, since 1851, by the South Kensington School, what may we not expect from American activity, stimulated by the Philadelphia Exhibition? Everywhere, already, educators are pointing out defects, stimulating emulation, and they find an echo in the teachers of the schools, as well as in the employers of labour. France must defend that pre-eminence in Art which has heretofore been unquestioned. She has enormous resources which ought to be developed by wellplanned primary instruction. With us, as elsewhere, it is not enough to have excellent special teachers of drawing. It is not enough to have good courses and good special schools, all teachers, male and female, must be able to give the first instruction in drawing, in daily classes, to all their scholars. France, which has gone to work energetically after her misfortunes, ought to devote herself to the study of drawing with no less ardour, and reinvigorate her productive powers at the very sources of Art.'

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The following is from the last report of the Boston School Committee: The question of teaching trades in our schools is one of vital importance. If New England would maintain her place as the great industrial centre of the country, she must become to the United States what France is to the

rest of Europe the first in taste, the first in design, the first in skilled workmanship. She must accustom her children from early youth to the use of tools, and give them a thorough training in the mechanic Arts.'

To illustrate what has been thought and said in the United States about the need of reform in popular education, let me give some extracts from another paper by Mr Walter Smith, addressed to the Teachers' Association; and these remarks have weight, because they come from a man trained at South Kensington who has given his life to the study of the subject, and whose suggestions of reform have been adopted by the people of the United States, who are sparing not time, nor money, nor energy in carrying them out.

He is speaking of the condition of the country as affected by the education of the people, and which of us will say that the words do not equally apply to Canada, except in so far as our virgin soil yields richer returns than the rocky slopes of New England :

The farms are deserted and rendered impecunious by a generation of people educated above the demands of manual toil, though below the requirements of industrial, productive skill. As another consequence, both agriculture and manufacturing industry are alike in a low condition; for the literary gentlemen we produce in our schools, who are too cultivated to touch the handle of a plough, are too ignorant to grasp and wield the handle of a brush or a hammer.

It can

not be denied that the education of the public schools, excellent as it may be to prepare a small number of persons, such as clerks, shopmen and the like, for the distribution of industrial products, is out of joint with the needs of a vast majority of the people, who have to become engaged in the production of industrial wealth in a manufacturing community. It must be acknowledged that this majority have

not had the practical education which would fit them for work in the workshop, and alone would enable them to achieve success. The counting-houses and offices are overcrowded by people qualified to carry messages or to count, whilst the farms and the factories and the mechanical trades are languishing for want of skilled labour, or are precariously supporting themselves by

rude industries.

'The great need of this country is the development of its natural resources by skilled labour applied to agriculture and mechanics; that is, the raising of all kinds of food and the raw materials of the industrial arts; and secondly, the creation of skilled mechanical and artistic labour, which shall in the future make the country independent of foreign importation of manufactures, and itself selfsustaining. In other words, we want tillers of the soil and manufacturers of its products,-farmers and mechanics.

'Those are the men this country needs to-day more than any other, and the only way to produce them on their native soil is to make the elements of science and art integral parts of all education from the primary school until the technical school or university has been passed through and practical life begins. That is what we must do to put ourselves upon an equality with other industrial nations; and until we do so, we shall be hewers of wood and drawers of water to other countries possessing greater skill than we possess.'

'We want to be able to turn out boys from our common schools qualified by the elements of practical education, and not only able but willing and anxious to go out into the wilderness to conquer and subdue it; fit to go into a manufactory and through all the steps upwards until the whole business is understood and the factory belongs to the boy; or go into a workshop and put honesty, taste, and skill, into the workmanship; go upon a ship and think it more the work of a man to

sail the boat than to be a sick passenger in her. The want of skill among native mechanics is simply tragical in its costliness and its wastefulness, to say nothing of the vexation and loss it entails on their unfortunate employers. The deep-seated cause of all this is this smirk at physical labour, because we have not made provision in our schools that manual labour shall be skilled, and this keeps the more intelligent and aspiring of youths away from it, each one apparently crying out "give me anything, anything to do, except the work of a man." And so, whatever may be the dearth of skilled workmen and qualified master workmen, the stock of men-milliners is never exhausted, and you can always find an Adonis whose occupation is to sell tape, gloves, and blue ribbons, to young ladies.

'Half the indoor occupations which men now fill, requiring no physical strength or hardihood, should be resigned to women, who would discharge the duty infinitely better than men can, because of their more perfect patience and forbearance, fortified by equal skill; and the men who are now hiding behind counters, distributing the fruits of industry, should be engaged in their production, and resign their positions as shopmen and book-keepers to the large and increasing army of intelligent women who lack employment and deserve it. And then, let those of whom it has been said "the glory of a young man is his strength," take a turn in the fields at the plough; in the workshop, at cunning craftmanship; in the factory, providing for the million; at the ranche, supplying the markets of the world; on the broad ocean, ruling the waves in the interest of civilization; that they may learn and practise the endurance and forethought and government and productiveness, of which men alone are capable, at their best.'

To show what our neighbours are actually doing in this direction, let us take the State of Massachusets. It

has a population of 1,600, 000-about 400,000 less than that of the Province of Ontario. Their present organization of Art Schools dates from 1871, before which time all that they did was tentative and experimental, as our similar attempts here have been, only that we have had less encouragement and assistance from public opinion.

An Act of the State Legislature in 1870 obliged every town or city of ten thousand inhabitants or upwards to establish free evening drawing schools, and authorized their establishment, under the direction of the school committees, in smaller places; drawing was also made part of the regular instruction in all public schools. In 1873, the Normal Art School was established for the education of teachers of industrial art, and is supported by an annual State grant of $20,000, the support of the other art teaching and free art schools being made compulsory upon the municipalities.

In the primary schools two hours per week are devoted to drawing, very small children beginning upon their slates. The exercises are, drawing of geometrical forms with explanation of terms, drawing from flat copies of objects, drawing the objects themselves, drawing from memory, drawing from dictation, and arranging simple forms in original designs. The ease with which children learn to draw, and the interest they take in their drawing, would astonish those who look back to the inky fingers and blank despair of their early writing lessons. The extent to which accurate recollection of form can be cultivated is displayed in the drawings from memory, and the precise appreciation of language, as proved by the drawing of complex forms from dictation, shows how easily a scientific term is understood and retained in the mind when the eye has mastered the form or object which it represents. Perhaps, however, the most striking result brought out by these drawing lessons is the ingenuity

displayed by young people in original design-indeed, for this, children seem to have a natural aptitude which is generally crushed out of them as ordinary education or work squeezes them, like bricks in a mould, into a dull, monotonous similarity. An instance came under my own notice of the son of a wood carver in the City of Boston, only ten years old, who, out of school, makes designs which his father carves in wood.

In the Grammar and High Schools the same system is carried on into higher branches of science and art, and in the City of Boston alone 30,000 children are being thus taught.

Eye witnesses alone can appreciate how much more this plan of education is doing for the rising generation than has ever been attempted before; and not many more years will pass by before we have to stand in direct industrial competition with a nation thus educated.

In Canada, a little, but a very little,

has been attempted in this way. Art schools on a small scale, started and carried on by a few persons, called enthusiasts, are doing what they can in the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

The educational authorities are willing and anxious to move, but they cannot move effectually without the support of public opinion. Teachers are trying to introduce drawing into the common schools, but they need to be taught themselves. School trustees are masters of the situation, and they are not always selected for their knowledge of science or appreciation of art.

Is it presumptuous to suggest this as a theme to be considered and spoken of by those who are to be chosen as our representatives at the forthcoming elections to the Provincial Legislature, or, at any rate, to commend to the serious attention of the thinking portion of the community, who are desirous of advancing the material interests, and elevating the aims of the Canadian people?

Barrie.

LOVE'S CHOICE.

From the Catalanese of AUSIAS MARCH (A. D. 1500 circ.)

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AM as he, who, when in need of food

To satisfy his hunger's pressing voice,
Cannot arrive at any certain choice
Betwixt two apples in a blooming wood;
From one of those fair fruits he must refrain
Before the other one may quench his thirst,
And so am I by like dilemma curst,—
Choice is pure loss before it proves its gain;
So groans the sea and labours as in pain,

:-

Crying 'neath two strong winds that beat on it, For from Levantine shores there meet on it Strong gales and west winds from the coast of Spain Until the heavier storm at last prevails:Thus did two great desires contend in me, Two gusty passions strive and disagree, Till in thy harbour now I furl my sails.

F. R.

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