CHAPTER IV THE OPPORTUNITIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF A QUERY and a criticism. "How is it that the in wages when we pay a shilling, and yet compete with us in the markets of the world?" This is a question that was addressed to industrial England by an English business man whose knowledge of industrial conditions in three continents qualifies him as an expert. When Mr. Mosely put that question he thought the answers could be found in American education. Accordingly, he invited a score or more of the leading teachers, ablest scholars, and keenest investigators of Great Britain to help him. study American schools and methods of teaching. some What was the result? In the report of the Mosely Commission we can see ourselves as others see us others, at any rate critics who tell us some unpleasant truths. These English experts, to a man, declare that it is not because of our schools that we succeed; some of them insist that if we keep up the pace it will be in spite of our schools and schooling. What is it, then, that gives us such advantage of our old-world neighbors? One answer is as follows: "America's industry is what it is primarily because of the boundless energy, the restless enterprise, and the 1The Commencement Address delivered at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, 1906. capacity for strenuous work with which her people are endowed; and because these powers are stimulated to action by the marvelous opportunities for wealth production which the country offers. These conditions have determined the character of all American institutions the schools included. The schools have not made the people what they are, but the people, being what they are, have made the schools." Moreover, it is pointed out that our present schools are too young to have had any perceptible influence on our industrial activity or social life. Our leaders of to-day were trained under the old régime or have come to us from abroad, some with good schooling, others with little of any kind. Our workmen, the best of them, are self-trained or imported ready-made. The only native quality that we apparently have or exercise is, as Professor Armstrong says, "cuteness." And in this respect schooling is of little account. He says: "In point of fact, American cuteness would seem to be conditioned by environment rather than by school education. The country was settled by adventurous, high-minded men; the adventurous and restless spirits of Europe have been attracted there for generations past; the conditions have always been such as to develop enterprise and to stimulate individuality and inventiveness: so that, during the whole period in which the continent has been gradually acquired and settled on, there has been a constant and invigorating struggle going on against nature in one form or another, the Indian probably having played no mean part in the education of the race. Such being the case, it is important to remember that some at least of these influences are now withdrawn and that development may, in consequence, be along different lines in future, especially as the enervating influence of machinery is also coming into play more and more." The causes of success. In the introduction to this report Mr. Mosely discounts some of the findings of his experts. He points out that South Africa is a land of great opportunity, that it possesses enormous resources, that it has been settled by as brave a people as can be found anywhere, and that in all essential respects it is not unlike the United States or any other new country. Despite all this, he maintains, South Africa has not begotten great industrial leaders and that but for the trained American engineer South Africa would still be undeveloped and unproductive. He finds the secret of American success, therefore, in the American system of education. Here are three reasons given by keen men bent on finding the causes of American industrial success: (1) A golden opportunity in a new country marvelously rich in natural resources, (2) the disposition of the typical American to take chances, to play the game to the end whatever the odds; and (3) professional training directed to practical ends. No one can deny that these three causes have been potent factors in all our past. But what of the future? Is the opportunity what it once was? Will American shrewdness still find free scope? Shall we still have need of professional training? Seventy-five years The period of rapid development. ago we had a population of 17,000,000, the great West virgin soil, our forests scarcely touched, our mines almost wholly undeveloped, our foreign trade of no account, few steamships, and less than 3,000 miles of railroad. No equal period in all history can at all compare with the two generations just passed in the creation of wealth and the exploitation of natural resources. It has been an age of unparalleled advance in man's ability to control and direct the forces of nature, the age of steam and electricity. "The United States has to-day within its borders," says an eminent economist (President James), "an effective power in the engines at work, far surpassing the total possible power of the entire population of the world a century ago. In many lines of work one man, with the aid of a small machine, may do as much as fifty or a hundred men could have done at the beginning of the century. While in other departments, owing to the development of the application of steam and electricity, one man may do what all the population of the world combined could not have accomplished a hundred years ago." The spirit of pioneering. The achievements of the last century, particularly those of the last score of years, are of such stupendous magnitude and so revolutionary in character as to fix a gulf between the life of to-day and that which our ancestors led when they began the conquest of this new world. The man who braved the dangers of the deep, for weeks together, in a sailing vessel, tossed about on an uncharted ocean and landed upon an inhospitable shore, had faith and fortitude and courage unknown to those of us to-day who think of a sea voyage as a pleasant relaxation from every-day toil. The prayer for the person going to sea is no longer suffused with the emotions which once characterized that formal appeal to the "Eternal God who alone spreadest out the heavens and stillest the raging of the sea to guard the loved one from all danger, from sickness, from the violence of enemies and from every evil to which he may be exposed and to conduct him in safety to the haven where he would be." The pioneer who set out alone to explore unknown wilds, or with wife and children turned his face to the setting sun to found a new home beyond the mountains, or on the plains, or across the great desert, was made of sterner stuff than his descendant who complains of the luxuries of the palace car and chafes under the restraint of a few minutes delay in making schedule time across the continent. The man whose success calls for individual initiative, whose subsistence is gained by the work of his own hands, whose life depends upon a quick eye and a sure aim, such a man is somehow radically different from the men of to-day. He belongs to a by-gone age, to the days of homespun and log cabin and flintlock days of the simple life, the hardest kind of living. the The willingness to take a chance. It is little wonder that the typical American has learned to take chances, that the gambler's instinct within him amounts almost to a passion, that on the thing he wants he will stake his last dollar, even life itself. Without this passion to win out or die in the attempt, a direct inheritance with our AngloSaxon blood, this country could not have been developed as it has. Without it we should doubtless be playing the rôle of a South American republic, or be like Africa, a bone to be snarled over by European dogs of war. As a people we have taken the chance that was offered to us a century ago and we have played the game, most of the |