They like to hear, or see, or
own, or eat, what others have made, but they do not like to put their
own hands to work. If you doubt what I say, put a notice in the paper
asking for a clerk, and you will have a, hundred answers for every one
that will come when you ask for a workman. So it comes to pass that
young men grow up whose hands have not been trained to any kind of
skill; they wish, therefore, to be buyers and sellers, traders, dealers,
and so the market is overstocked with clerks, book-keepers, salesmen,
and small shop-keepers, while it is understocked in all the higher walks
of hand-craft. Some men can only get on by force of arms, lifting,
pounding, heaving, or by power of sitting at counter or a desk and
"clerking it."
Machinery works against hand-craft. In many branches of labor, the hand
now has but little to do, and that little is always the same, so that
labor becomes tiresome and the workman dull. Machines can be made to cut
statuary, to weave beautiful tapestry, to fashion needles, to grind
out music, to make long calculations; alas! the machine has also
been brought into politics. Of course, a land cannot thrive without
machinery; it is that mechanical giant, the steam engine, which carries
the corn, the cotton, and the sugar from our rich valleys to the hungry
of other lands, and brings back to us the product of their looms.
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