The Ketchum keystone. [volume] (Ketchum, Idaho) 1885-1899, 1892-12-03

man who can only read and write
can stand at machine and make
the heads of pins from one years
end to another till he dies, and yet
be tolerably happy. To any one at
all educated such q life would be
literally maddening. To have ac-
quired q certain taste for music and
poetry, and then make the heads
Of pins or split steel pens ten hours
out of the twenty-four from seven
teen to seventy would drive him
crazy. To be able to do the same
work every day for eight or ten
hours requires an utterly blank in
tellect. If your brain is working
full power in thought while your
muscles are working at heaving
coal month after month you would
wear out. The amount of vitality
at your disposal would not stand it.
And whether your health would
stand it or not, you would not. An
educated man working out his life
as a dock laborer would attain
misery horrible to contemplate.
Education lifts men into a different
sphere, gives them different ideas
Of pleasure, different standards of
comfort. One can think of no
more exquisite torture for an edu-
Gated man than to send him to live
on 18 shillings a week in court in
Whitechapel, working ten hours q
day at making, say, French nails.
He would blow his brains out, poor
fellow, and we could hardly blame
him; or, more probably, he would
get a few hundred others, similarly
situated, together, throw up a bar
ricade and fight savagely for life
and plunder, as happens every ten
years in France.
We believe their is vast amount
of dull, contented happiness among
the working classes, and we cannot
see what good will be done by rob-
bing us or them of that belief. Of
course happiness is largely a mat
ter of belief and of temperament,
and doubtless if you tell people
they ought to be miserable, often
enough they will begin to be miser-
able, or at least uncomfortable. At
present the working class is happy
enough-far happier, we suspect,
than the brain laborers, with whom
certain measure of melancholy
seems to be chronic.
What, then, is the good of teach
ing them either languages or science
and uniting them for manual
labor? Do let us remember that
brain labor is a luxury, and poets
are luxury, and gentlemen are a
luxury, and art, science, phlloso-
phy luxuries. Whereas bread, and
boots and pins and French nails
are a necessity, and without butch
ers and bakers the world could not
60 on day.
There can be bread without phil
osophy, but we cannot be philoso-
pliers if there are no bakers to feed
us. Let us, therefore, not interfere
recklessly with natures supply of
bakers and tillers of the soil, and
heaven will send us enough philos-
ophers. If people are too highly ed
ucated to plow, the world must
starve. This, it must be remem-
bered, will prove no bar to the rise
of great talent or genius. Genius
has forced it's way to recognition
before now, despite lowly birth and
small opportunities. One might in
stance countless names. We do
not wish to keep any one down.
All we protest against is the pulling
Of everyone up-by the roots-as it
seems to US. The same problem
is agitating France that is troubling
us, and NJ. Taine, in the Revue des
Deux Mondes, has put it forward
from the French standpoint with all
the force of his pen. When we have
no laborers and no artisans and
no bakers and no domestic SER
wants, we may perhaps begin to re-
alize our error; but not, we suppose,
till then.-London Review.
Siberia Not q Desert.