II. Let us turn to the educational side of the scheme.
When a lad has passed the standards--very likely a bright, clever
little chap, who had passed the sixth and even the seventh standard
with credit--it becomes necessary for him immediately to earn the
greater part of his own living. It is not in the power of his father,
who lives from week to week, or even from day to day, to apprentice
his boys and put them to a trade. They must earn their living at once.
What are they to do?
At the very age when these boys have reached the point when the
intellect, already partly trained and the hand, not yet trained at
all, should begin to work together, they are faced by the terrible
fact--how terrible to them they little know--that they can be taught
no trade. They must go out into the world with a pair of unskilled
hands, and nothing more. Consider. A country lad learns every day
something new; he learns continually by daily practice how to use his
hands and his strength, by the time he is eighteen he has become a
very highly skilled agriculturist; he knows and can do a great many
most useful and necessary things. But the town lad, if he learns no
trade, learns nothing. He will never have any chance in life; he can
never have any chance; he is foredoomed to misery; he will all his
life be a servant of the lowest kind; he will never have the least
independence; he will, in all probability, be one of those who wait
day by day for the chance gifts of Luck.
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