EDITOR’S OUTLOOK.

TO THE CLASS OF 1884—GREETING.

The completing of a course of study affords one of the few unalloyed satisfactions of life. It is an end reached—and it has been reached by personal effort. The class is at the goal, and it is there because it chose to be there, and resolutely and persistently labored to be there. We get many good things without effort, but they give us less satisfaction than meaner things which we have earned. There is a charm in winning a race, which does not consist either in being at the end of it, or in getting a prize. The victory is “our very own,” as the children say. But in a course of study completed one feels that the prize is worth his pains. He may feel discontented with the imperfections of his knowledge, but he would not for the world be put back where he began. We hold many things only with our hands; the fruits of a course of study are more secure—they are in our minds and hearts, and therefore can not fall out of our possession, or be wrested from us.

It is a good thing for the student to take the refreshment of looking back to the place of beginning. “What was I when I began?” This sense of gain is apt to be supplanted by discontent and looking forward; but the student should give himself the comfort of the backward glance. No one has pursued our course of reading and study to the end without very great improvement in mental power and method, or without large additions to his knowledge. “Look to the hole of the pit.” Take a long look at your old self and do not hesitate to prefer the new self. You are wiser, stronger, better. Allow yourself the luxury of fully realizing that. And how little it has cost you! A piecing together of fragments of time that would otherwise have been wasted, that is the greater part of the cost of your course. Whatever else you have spent you would have spent less wisely if you had not been in the course. You have sacrificed nothing of any moment to this object. All else that you had you keep still; this fruit of patient study you have as a clean and pure gain. It is a matter to be happy about. A good hour of self-complacency will do you no harm. Indulge your self-respect a little. All might do what you have done; most of them have not done it. Your graduation is of itself a proof that you have pluck, constancy, and self-control.

It is worth while to consider the elements of this victory. You have mixed time and method with reading and study. Hap-hazard study would not yield the fruit; it could not be ripened in a day. “Four months—and harvest.” Nor could method be left out. There is method in any work; method distinguishes work from play. There is method on the farm, in the mill, in the store. There must be method in gaining knowledge. Method makes tasks easy and combines many strokes into one result. In this combination of time and method lies the power of a course of study. All the mental effort is probably put forth by others spasmodically and unmethodically. You are at the end simply because you harnessed your efforts with years and system. Only stable and earnest characters are capable of the patient continuance in well-doing which is necessary to the completion of a course of study. College men say that the majority of those who begin a course fall out by the way; and they add that, whatever pretexts are used, the real reason is usually defective character. It is a rule in all undertakings of mankind; holdfast is the master quality. The men and women who complete the C. L. S. C. course do so on purpose and because they are capable of tenacity of purpose, and it is an education in tenacity. The man who has run such a race through is capable of running other races. He has learned how to “keep pegging away,” as Lincoln put it. He knows how to run—how to study. He likes to study. He has only begun in the great museum of knowledge, but he will go on searching its shelves until he is graduated into the large university of immortality. Ingratitude to our past selves is a human frailty which is often displayed, even ostentatiously, by men and women. Many there are who boast that they learned nothing at school; there are more who complain that they were taught nothing. Dr. Samuel Johnson was truer to himself in saying that he had learned nothing since. We hope that C. L. S. C. graduates will never fall into this cant. Be just now and always to yourselves and to those who have guided you through this journey. You have not learned everything, but you have learned how to learn. What you build yourself into hereafter will be built on this foundation. If you come to more wisdom do not be guilty of the meanness of despising these foundations. If the building rises high and stands firm, the glory of it will be these well-laid stones. If the building does not rise, yours the fault, for you will have neglected the solid base which invites you to build. Go on with the building; but do not forget now and again to bless the years when you were laying the first blocks of a studious life. In short, we have read you a little homily on self-respect. Take an honest satisfaction in your course; keep a just respect for your tenacity and application; cherish your love for those who have helped and inspired you in the good work.

THE DECLINE OF OUR WORKMAN.

The manufacturing classes of this country doubtless present a much more favorable condition of the workmen than prevails in other countries. The men who are generally described as laborers—whether they work isolated or in bodies—occupy a higher level of life than the same class in the old world. We may pass by, as being, in dispute, the question of the protective system’s relation to this fact. The higher condition of workmen is partly a result of democratic institutions and the absence of social grades in society; partly also of the youth of this country and its abundance of natural bounties. We have had the unexampled good fortune to be a young country rapidly developing wealth. A democratic level, a republican simplicity, vast stores of undeveloped natural wealth, and a system of free schools and free churches, have probably conspired to produce a high grade of workmen. We naturally desire to keep this feature of American society and industry. We note with alarm any sign that workmen are dropping to a lower level. It is not exclusively a humanitarian feeling which prompts us to maintain our workmen on a high level. We have all come to be interested in the prosperity of this section of the community. The economic usefulness of a man may be as conveniently measured by what he consumes as by what he does. In fact, his consuming power is the more accurate measure of his value. It is not so much a question of the number of strokes per day of which he is capable, as of the power he has to buy and use what his fellows produce. In this country the workman’s consuming power is probably at least twice as great as it is in Europe. This means that forty per cent. of our people buy twice as much as the corresponding forty per cent. buy in Europe. The effect is to greatly enlarge the market which we are all supplying with various kinds of goods. The reduction of this growing section of our population to the European condition would cause a contraction of the market, and an arrest of our industrial development, such as we have never experienced. We should be able to make just as many goods as now, but the people who now buy them would be obliged to reduce their buying, and this reduction would make an appalling aggregate. If twenty millions of people should at once reduce their annual purchases by one-half, the effect would be a more complete bankruptcy of us all than we have ever dreamed of. The reduction might come about slowly and with less peril; but even then the stagnation would be fatal to a large portion of the community. The truth is that we have a new factor in our industrial life, a new economic co-efficient. It is the well-paid workman, who is a relatively large consumer. Relatively to population the market we are all engaged in supplying is a much larger market than exists in Europe. We are built upon a foundation of which this well-paid laborer is an important part. We added an immense mass to this foundation when we emancipated the slaves. We increased the demand for goods by the difference between the cost of supporting a slave and that of supporting a free man. The new factor is a sum to be estimated only by the study of our own country. It never before existed in any country. It is a fact without a precedent; and it is so large that the whole fabric of our prosperity rests upon it. Gradgrind may persuade himself that he does not care whether poor men can buy goods or not; but his persuasion to that indifference will give way just as soon as the poor cease to buy his goods. In short, Gradgrind can not afford to see the buying power of workmen reduced with complacency. It means, whenever it becomes a general fact, ruin for Gradgrind. Whoever has anything or produces anything has given bonds for the maintenance of workmen’s wages.

Well, then, the alarm has already been sounded. We do not refer to the “tariff reform”—though that may be fatal—but to more certain matters over which the tariff laws have no power. It is affirmed that the character, social status, aspirations and self-respect of workmen in this country has already fallen. An observer in a manufacturing center recently said: “The change in ten years is frightful. The old hands have risen in life or gone west. The new hands live in smaller quarters, care less for the comfort of their families, and buy fewer goods of any kind. They read less, take newspapers more rarely, are less careful to dress well on Sunday, and see their children in rags with a complacency which was unknown ten years ago. The new people are from Europe, and nine in ten of them have brought their old habits with them. Higher wages mean to them only more rum and more idleness.”

We hope that this is an exaggeration. But even if it be only very partially true, it opens an unexpected vista, and an alarming one. The only way to maintain workmen’s wages is to keep up workmen’s characters. If the character grows debased the wages will drop to that lower level. A higher grade of living is the only possible security for higher wages. Workmen can not long get high wages to spend in rum shops. Wages will sink to the level of their life. But if the common market is to suffer so great a loss as this fall in wages and consuming power would occasion, then we must all suffer. Nor is this all. The failure would be that of our civilization. We are, every way, in all sources, most deeply interested in arresting the threatened decline of the American workman.

EFFICIENCY AND TENURE.

The tenure of office in this country will be the subject of animated discussion for some years. Civil Service Reform aims to correct an abuse, and will probably achieve that end; but it is not certain that the right method of reform has been found. The ideal of good service is presented by a bank in which men serve indefinitely, and yet must serve efficiently. They are removed if they fail; they are not removed if they succeed. The difficulty in applying this rule to any form of public service lies in removals for cause. How to secure the removal of the man who fails? In the bank it is a simple thing to discharge a clerk. In public life it is not at all simple or easy. The clerk has no vested right to his place in the bank; in a department at Washington, a clerk has a vested right to his place. The bank removes because it chooses to do so. The government must invent some pretext or prove inefficiency. Tenure during good behavior makes a quasi property of the office.

The ministry presents a good example of the workings of office tenure. Thousands of churches are without installed pastors, and one of the reasons given is that churches find it easier to install a man than to dismiss him. In the Methodist Church a hot discussion over the rule which limits continuous service in one church to three years has afforded good observers a fine opportunity to see the play of feeling and motive around the tenure principle. The change proposed has met with a crushing defeat, because Methodists are more anxious to keep the power to get rid of a poor pastor than they are to get the power to keep a good one. Why? Because they have much more experience of inefficient men than of efficient men. In short, the church says to itself: “Pastors usually fail; they rarely succeed; it is best to be able to send them away quietly.” This is not complimentary to the ministry, but it is the substance of the argument which has defeated a plan which had the sympathy of the best men in Methodism. The fact that in other denominations changes of pastors are about as frequent as among Methodists has the same explanation. For some reason the inefficient ministers are believed to be more numerous than the efficient. There is a suspicion in the general mind that this is true all round the circle of salaried life, and that we need swift and easy and decorous means of removing our public and semi-public servants more than we need to fortify the good men in their positions. In the large view, what ails us is poor work; and people in general think that the poor work is already tied fast to us. The human nature of the public has been too much overlooked. The human nature of the employed has hardly ever received appropriate attention. There are two kinds of persons to be considered in estimating the effect of time limits in any service. To one kind of man security of tenure is a means of increased efficiency. He is zealous and enterprising in his vocation. He is acutely conscientious toward his employers, the more so the less they are visible and near to him. To be secure in his place is to this man freedom to do good work and conduct his career to fruitful issues. Any other tenure means to him a harassing uncertainty in all plans and wearying anxieties about bread and butter questions. Such a man can not serve a cause of any kind well on an uncertain or limited tenure of office. The only possible uncertainty for him—the only one consistent with good work—is that which concerns the quality of his work. That species of uncertainty is one which he feels to be in his power. He will do his work so well that no uncertainty shall exist. But at the other extreme is a man to whose success the sense of security is fatal. He works best under the whip of uncertainty. He becomes lazy when the fear of removal does not exist. Between the two extremes—conscientious enthusiasm at one end and place-keeping inefficiency at the other—are men of a variety of tendencies to one or the other character. Colleges probably present the best view of the effect of security of tenure. The general public does not possess intimate knowledge of the results of the system in seats of learning; but now and then an intestine broil uncovers the college life, and invariably discloses an unsatisfactory condition. For a good professor fixed tenure is most wholesome; for a poor one it is unwholesome in its effects on his character and work. A man of wide experience in colleges tells us that there is not a college in the country but is lugging inefficient men; and he expresses the opinion that less than half of the college men are the best men for their places. In short, even in the college, unfit men get places and keep them, to the great detriment of the college. In an average institution four thoroughly good men carry six other men. A few give the college its character; the majority are a burden, and some men in this majority gloat over their supposed right to be lugged by the college. Any rule which should rid colleges of mere place-holders, of men weak in character, negligent in work, and far behind the times in scholarship would double the usefulness and the patronage of colleges in ten years. But if certainty of tenure is bad in college, it must be worse elsewhere.

What is generally desired in the matter of tenure in service of any sort is to cut off the chances for the purchase and sale of places, and for the capricious and interested removal of good men. The scandals growing up in public life from this base caprice in the appointing power have sickened the popular stomach. Take, for example, the forced resignation of a stenographer, at the end of a session, in order that the speaker of the House of Representatives might appoint his own nephew to the place for the vacation, during which there were no duties. The filthiness of the proceeding surpasses belief; and yet it seems not to have provoked any proper indignation in Congress. But fixed tenure has more evils than it cures, and some middle way should be found. We can not afford to ignore the fact that average men need the spur. The highly conscientious and enterprising servant is yet too rare in the world for it to be safe to adjust the terms of service to his character and to leave the majority free from the whip.