ADVANTAGE OF EDUCATION TO LABORERS
Manufacturers find intelligent educated mechanics more profitable to employ, even at higher wages, than those who are uneducated. We have never met any one who had much experience in employing large numbers of men who did not hold this opinion, and, as a general rule, those manufacturers are most successful who are most careful to secure intelligent and skillful workmen.
It requires extensive observation to enable one even partially to appreciate the wonderful extent to which all the faculties are developed by mental cultivation. The nervous system grows more vigorous and active, the touch is more sensitive, and there is greater mobility in the hand.
We once knew a weaving room filled with girls above the average in character and intelligence, and there was one girl among them who had been highly educated. Though length of arms and strength of muscle are advantages in weaving, and though this girl was short and small, she always wove the greatest nun of pieces in the room, and consequently drew the largest pay at the end of every month. We might fill many pages with similar cases which have come under our own observation, but there is no occasion. It has long since been settled by the general observation of manufacturers, that intelligent workmen will do more and better work than ignorant ones.
But the excess in the amount of work performed is not the most important respect in which an intelligent workman is superior to a stupid one. He is far more likely to be faithful to the interests of his employer, to save from waste and to turn to profit every thing that comes to his hand. There is also the exalted satisfaction of being surrounded by thinking, active and inquiring minds, instead of by brutes.
Such are some of the advantages to the “Captains of Industry,” which result from the employment of intelligent workmen; not in one article, nor in any number of articles, could these advantages be fully set forth. And if it is impossible to state the advantages to the employer, how vain must be the effort to describe those which result to the workman himself!
The increase of wages is the least and lowest of the rich rewards of mental culture. The whole being is enlarged and exalted; the scope of view is widened; the objects of interest are increased; the subjects of thought are multiplied; life is more filled with emotion; and the man is raised in the scale of creation.
To intelligent English travelers, nothing in the United States has excited such wonder and admiration as Lowell, Nashua, Manchester, Lawrence, and the other manufacturing towns of New England. That factory-girls should play on the piano, and sustain a creditable magazine by their own contributions; that their residences should be clean, commodious, and elegant; that factory-men should be intelligent gentlemen, well-read in literature, and totally unacquainted with beer and its inspirations, have been, for many years, the crowning marvels of America to all travelers of right feeling and good judgment.
In the education of a business man, it must never be forgotten, that his future life will be a life of action and study. Great care must therefore be taken that the health be not impaired in a strife for useless honors, that the feelings be not suffered to grow over-sensitive in recluse contemplation, nor the mind lose its spring and elasticity under a load of cumbersome and unpractical learning. It has been said that at least one-fourth of the students of colleges leave them with impaired health; full one-half are too sensitive to bear the rude jostling of the world; and perhaps two-thirds of the remainder have some defect that would seriously mar their happiness and usefulness.