| THE DANGER OF UNSKILL |
By WALTER G. BEACH
STATE COLLEGE OF WASHINGTON, PULLMAN, WASH.
TWO human streams pour ceaselessly into the sea of American industry. One of these brings to us the immigrant, the man of foreign stock, alien in blood and customs, and more and more from the backward and "beaten" peoples of eastern Europe. The sources of the other stream are in our own life, and upon it are borne America's own children who, in the passing of years, are to face the duties of manhood and womanhood. These two streams fill the vast national reservoir of labor upon which depends in large measure the future of American industry and American moral welfare. This is the first fact to which attention is directed.
The second fact is the changing character of industry, aside from its human element. We are in the midst of the great mechanical revolution whose beginning in America goes back to the early years of the nineteenth century, but which since the civil war has been uprooting the old order, supplanting its simpler methods with marvelous rapidity and tremendous power.
The human consequence of this revolution is the driving out of the man by the machine, on the one hand, and the increasing specialization of labor on the other. And the labor supplanted by the machine, if it is to fit into the resulting more specialized employments, must have skill. Primitive man was unspecialized and his skill was of the slightest, his knowledge being insignificant. The man of to-day finds that sheer muscle is at a discount, and his weaker but better trained fellow passes him in the race. It is not meant that there is not a great demand for unskilled labor, but the unskilled laborer works under a constantly growing handicap.
In our earlier national history, it was possible for us to rely for prosperity upon the resources of nature. Force of body and character sufficient to brave the hardships of a raw and untrained world, and to pluck from nature the bounties which she furnished in abundance, was the quality most essential. Each man or family was a unit in production; cooperation or combination on any extended scale involving training, was not found or needed. Individualism and the overthrow of nature, and her exploitation, were the important features of our national life which assured success; and it was just these qualities of endurance, courage, force, assertiveness, aided by sheer muscle, which the selective
