WOMEN AND VOCATIONAL TRAINING

The United States started its national existence with an out-of-doors people.  Until comparatively recent years, the cities were small, and the great bulk of the inhabitants lived from the natural resources of the country, that is to say, from the raw products of the mines and the forests, and the crops grown upon the plains by a most primitive and wasteful system of agriculture.  But the days have forever gone when a living can be snatched, so to speak, from the land in any of these ways.  The easily gotten stores of the mines and forests are exhausted; the soil over many millions of acres has been robbed of its fertility.  The nation is now engaged in reckoning up what is left in the treasury of its natural resources, estimating how best to conserve and make profitable use of what is left.

The nation might have done this sooner, but there was in the West always fresh land to open up and in the East, after a time, a new source of income in the factory industries, that were more and more profitably absorbing capital and labor.  So that although pioneer conditions gradually passed away, and it became less easy to wrest a living from plain or mountain or mine, the idea of finding out what was wrong, improving methods of agriculture, conserving the forest wealth by continual replanting or working the less rich mines at a profit through new processes, or the utilization of by-products, did not at first suggest itself.

When, on the other hand, we turn to the manufacturing occupations, we find that they have followed an analogous, though not precisely similar, course of evolution.  Certainly from the first the manufacturers showed themselves far ahead of their fellows in the economical management of the raw material, in the adoption of every kind of labor and time-saving device and in the disposal of refuse.  But in their way they have been just as short-sighted.  They carried with them into the new occupations the very same careless habits of national extravagance.  They, too, went ahead in a similar hustling fashion.  This time the resources that were used up so recklessly were human resources, the strength and vitality of the mature man, the flesh and blood of little children, their stores of energy and youthful joy and hope.  By overwork or accident, the father was cut off in his strong manhood, the boy was early worn out, and the young girl’s prospects of happy motherhood were forever quenched.

There are now signs of a blessed reaction setting in here, too, and it is largely owing to the efforts of organized labor.  The principles of conservation and of a wise economy, which are re-creating the plains of the West and which will once more clothe with forests the slopes of the mountains, are at work in the realm of industry.  Not a year passes but that some state or another does not limit anew the hours during which children may work, or insist upon shorter hours