the apprenticeship system, however, will not take from the influence of other methods any of their peculiar and important work."

DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEMS WHICH HAVE DEVELOPED.

The trade school as it is now carried on is a school to provide instruction in the mysteries and technique of special trades. Thus we have trade schools for carpenters, brick masons, machinists, etc. These trade schools supplement the trade instruction with the rudiments of an education, if the pupil does not already have them. He is taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and how to apply his knowledge of elementary mathematics to the particular trade which he is studying. He may get some other instruction which involves practice in a shop connected with the trade. Such schools flourish in Europe and America.

Trade unionists object to them because they do not and can not, in their estimation, turn out the full-fledged artisan, the man ready to go to work on his graduation. They also fear that the trade school will in many instances furnish recruits to take the places of strikers, thus aiding in the breaking of strikes. Unfortunately for this attitude, some prominent manufacturers have stated that this would be the result of any extended system of trade-school instruction. It is purely and simply an apprehension, but an apprehension has great weight until the minds of those holding it are disabused of their fear.

Those who believe in broad industrial education are also of the opinion that the trade school pure and simple is inadequate, that it does not go far enough, that it often teaches a single trade, and that adequate teaching of trades can only be fostered in large schools devoted to mechanical instruction. Nevertheless, the power and influence of the trade school must be recognized, and the fact that it has taken its place as one of the modern means of securing that skill which is overwhelmingly demanded everywhere, especially as a means of training our own boys how to work and training them in the best possible way.

The best equipped public industrial schools have all the machinery and appliances necessary for the instruction of the students, and teachers competent to instruct them in the branches of general education. Probably, too, often in large degree, they help to bridge over that dangerous period in the lives of young persons before they are old enough to enter upon an apprenticeship. This age is, accord

The foregoing section has been taken, with some alterations, from The Apprenticeship System as a Means of Promoting Industrial Efficiency. An address by the writer before the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, Chicago, Ill.,.Jan. 24, 1908.

ing to the laws of most of the States, from 14 to 16. Fourteen is the usual limit of the compulsory school age for those who are at work. Boys, and in many instances girls, coming out of school at that age are in a peculiar position. They are not old enough to enter upon specific trade education, either in trade schools or industrial schools, nor are they old enough to be desirable as apprentices under the apprenticeship system. They therefore take the line of least resistance in the nonskilled vocations and work from hand to mouth, and are too apt to remain as unskilled workers throughout their lives.

The report of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, known as the Douglas Commission, in its exhaustive investigations, found that in the State of Massachusetts alone there were at least 25,000 children between 14 and 16 who were in this precarious condition. This is undoubtedly true, and must be true throughout the country. Thus there are many, many thousands, reaching into the hundreds of thousands, that are in adverse conditions and must remain therein, because there is no adequate means for their entering upon well organized and fairly skilled trades. Here elementary industrial training in the public school has a large field for most useful activity.

The industrial school, so called, can not be definitely differentiated from the trade school, yet it is in fact distinct. It is not designed to teach any one trade, but groups of trades, plus rather advanced work on academic lines.

The industrial school must be equipped with machinery, tools, and all the appliances of the trades it undertakes to teach. It must have well organized class-room work, so that the students can secure all the results of education necessary for the practical working of their trades. It helps also to fill the gap between 14 and 16 years of age in rather a better way than does the trade school pure and simple. The industrial school or industrial education involves not only separate schools for the purpose, but industrial courses in the common schools, the idea being that by this method boys and girls will be kept in high school work longer in many instances than they would be under the public school system without vocational training. It is also asserted and thoroughly proved that in industrial schools, as distinguished from pure and simple trade schools, the academic work will be all the more valuable because allied to industrial training. The advocates of this system also believe that it is practically an extension of the manual-training idea which spread over the country so rapidly a few years ago. It is not aimed under manual training to teach boys or girls any definite line of work, but to familiarize them with the use of tools and some of the art of mechanical work.

The industrial school advances this proposition and makes it a practical means of developing skill along specific, practical, and useful lines, and it is this idea that is holding the public attention at the present time. As already intimated, it combines shop work with academic work. Thus the graduate of an industrial school is in a position to enter upon the trade selected with a degree of equipment that could not be obtained by the trade-school method alone, although the two forms are very closely connected and associated. Whether the apprenticeship system can under certain conditions and in particular localities take the place of either of these depends upon the development of the modern apprenticeship idea, as will be shown. This work, therefore, will deal specifically with the apprenticeship system in its relation to other systems of industrial training and education, but it must be understood that in this consideration there will be no effort made to belittle the trade school or the more advanced industrial school in any respect whatever. The writer is a warm advocate of industrial training and education, but it has seemed to him that the time has come to consider the apprenticeship system in relation to these other methods as one that should be brought to the attention of the public.

ORIGIN OF THE MODERN APPRENTICESHIP SYSTEM.

The old legal indentures of 1840 and before in England and America have very generally passed away in this country. In 1864, at a convention of employing printers, the apprenticeship system was generally spoken of as in disuse for twenty years; some insisted that it was entirely gone, and all writers and speakers of that period made similar statements. Excepting the case of isolated employers who used it for dishonest purposes in the acquiring of boy labor under conditions of practical contract slavery, it may be said that the English legal indenture system had at that time quite disappeared. So at that time also the apprenticeship system of America was in a state of chaos. Individual trades or individual employers attempted to meet the situation in varying ways as best subserved their private interests, but of established, permanent, and general apprentice systems it is quite true that they were nearly gone, certainly obsolescent. All parties then agreed as to the evils of the situation. Employers and employees alike bewailed the general decline of mechanical skill and the flooding of skilled trades with half-skilled labor. The employees insisted, and with bitter voice, against the competition of halfskilled, cheap labor, which was reducing wages. The labor papers discussed the low standard of mechanical skill, the advantages of the European form of apprenticeship, and the danger to the American

industrial world of a decline in the quality of American workmanship in the face of the maintained quality of European workmanship. These conditions were intimately connected with the transition in various trades due to the introduction of machinery and the division of American labor. So the period of the sixties found the country with the old American system either in disuse or seriously depreciated, while the modern system was yet unborn. But it is in the struggles of the sixties that there is to be found something of the origin of the modern system.

It was found in the hide and leather trade that there was one subject connected with the industrial interests of the United States which needed to be considered, debated, and studied over to a greater degree than any other subject pertaining to domestic wealth creation, and that was the apprentice system. The Daily Evening Voice, Boston, January 29, 1867, voiced the sentiment of that time when it ventured the assertion that there was not a single tradesman or master mechanic in Europe who would employ a journeyman at the age of 21 who had been allowed to stride through his apprenticeship in two or three years, and in that time had been under the instruction of perhaps, three or four masters.

The employing printers came quite near to the desires of the labor unions, and they felt (1) that the decline in the quality of printing skill must be stopped; (2) that under such excessive competition as existed it could only be stopped by a legal system of apprenticeship which would prevent the competition of partly trained workmen with the journeymen, and compel thorough training of apprentices. They favored quite generally a five-year apprenticeship.

Employers in other trades took a different position, opposing rather than favoring a binding system of apprenticeship, and favoring rather than opposing the introduction of partially skilled labor into the various trades. By "partially skilled" they meant labor skilled in a single part of a trade, i. e., a division of labor system. They felt that this kind of labor took less time to train and could in many instances take the form of boys, and was much cheaper than journeyman labor.

The employing plasterers, iron founders, glass manufacturers, leather manufacturers, and others contended for unlimited apprenticeship. The printers and the Illinois Central Railroad officials, who were most favorable at that time to regular apprenticeship, made no specifications as to limiting the number of apprentices. The employers were profiting by the cheap labor incident to wage competition in the skilled trades through a flooding of those trades by men and boys who had picked up a single line of the trade, and so they opposed any established system of apprenticeship which compelled

them to thoroughly teach the boys and limited the number of apprentices.

The position of the laborers upon the question of apprenticeship was such that it has seemed advisable to divide the whole matter into two parts, (1) the general labor attitude with regard to apprenticeship, and (2) the position of certain trades with regard to apprenticeship.

In regard to the general labor attitude, there were four main principles upon which the laborers of the sixty period seemed almost unanimous, and these were: (a) The limitation of the period of apprenticeship, in almost every case, to not less than five years. The strength of this five-year movement may be judged from the fact that in at least four States they attempted to make a legal limit of five years. (b) The limitation of the number of apprentices. The unanimous feeling among mechanics was that the cause of low wages, lack of work, and powerlessness of workers to withstand oppression by employers was due to an excessive number of workers in the various skilled trades, and that the outlook for the future was getting increasingly darker because of the continual pouring in of more boys. (c) The compelling of the employer to teach the whole trade to the apprentice. The workers continually complained, and the employing printers at least acknowledged the justice of their complaint, that at the end of the apprenticeship period a boy no longer knew his trade, but had been specialized upon some one part of it. (d) That a legal system of indenturing, very similar to the decadent system but purified of its abuses and adapted somewhat to modern conditions, was the only remedy for the situation. In Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Ohio efforts were made toward apprentice laws, and in Massachusetts a law was actually passed. The laws urged in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York were practically, if not quite, identical, the Pennsylvania agitation of 1864 being the first, Massachusetts following in 1865, New York and Illinois in 1869. The law of Illinois differed from the others in allowing a three to five year instead of a five-year period, and in requiring the consent of any minor over 15 years of age to his indenture.

The petitions which were presented to legislators in various parts of the country demanded, (1) that the apprentice should be legally bound for five years; (2) that the master should be compelled to teach him the entire trade and provide necessary schooling; (3) that the master should be responsible for his moral training; (4) that the number of apprentices should be limited.

The labor papers of the time had much to say upon the whole subject. The Chicago Workingmen's Advocate, Fincher's Trade Review, and the Daily Evening Voice, perhaps three of the most representative labor papers of the sixties and seventies, were thoroughly