Outside of school hours and during the long vacation, the fatal fascination of machinery draws these young people to factories, railroad yards, machine shops, and other places where they may indulge their fancy and craving for mechanical motion.  The boy who hangs around a machine shop or railroad yard is always pressed into voluntary and delighted service by those who work there.  In a small town in Wisconsin we once knew a boy who worked willingly and at the hardest kind of labor in a railroad yard for years, voluntarily and without a cent of pay.  In time he was entrusted with a small responsibility and given a small salary.  Even if the boy does not begin in this way, the result is substantially the same.  He may take the bit in his teeth, leave school and go to work at some trade which will give at least temporary satisfaction for his mechanical craving, or he may, through economic necessity, be forced out of school and naturally gravitate into a machine shop or factory.  Oftentimes a few dollars a week is a very welcome addition to the family income.  To the boy himself, three, four, five or six dollars a week seems like a fortune.  Neither the parents nor the boy look ahead.  Neither of them sees that when the little salary has increased to fifteen, sixteen, eighteen or twenty-five dollars a week, the boy will have reached the zenith of his possibilities.  There will then be no further advancement, unless, during his apprenticeship and journeymanship, or previously to them, he has secured mental training which will enable him to go higher, hold more responsible positions and earn larger pay.

“MAN OR MACHINE—­WHICH?”

In former days, the boy who left school and took up employment in a factory learned a trade.  He became a shoe-maker, or a harness-maker, or a wheelwright, or a gun-maker.  To-day, however, the work on all of these articles has been so subdivided that the boy perhaps becomes stranded in front of a machine which does nothing but punch out the covers for tin cans, or cut pieces of leather for the heels of shoes, or some other finer operation in manufacture.  Once he has mastered the comparatively simple method of operating his particular machine, the boy is likely to remain there for all time.  His employer—­perhaps short-sighted—­has no desire to advance him, because this would mean breaking in another boy to handle his machine.  Also, it would mean paying more money.

Al Priddy, in his illuminating book, “Man or Machine—­Which?"[9] thus describes the case of the slave to the machine: 

[Footnote 9:  The Pilgrim Press, Boston.]