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The Workshop and School
worldly possessions. Recently a man who had chosen the way of
business and in the pride of his success had asserted that a college
education was a detriment to a man of affairs, passed his vacation
in Europe.   It was observed that when away from his business he
was reduced for pleasurable exercise to gambling at Monte Carlo.
We were a little shocked at this, not that we regard gambling as a
sin, but that Monte Carlo seemed so trivial in view of the stimulus
which Europe offers to a man of true culture and insight.  But
is the third solution a way out of the difficulty? Should our young
man study half of the time and work at his trade the rest of the day?
This solution is reached, of course, by way of a compromise-a
compromise of the same nature as that presented in the labor world
by the eight-hour day.  It consists in reducing what is offensive
and undesirable to its lowest terms, in order that when necessity is
satisfied, the worker may be free for a season to do that which to
him is pleasurable. I cannot imagine a torture more grievous than
that.  Indeed, the orthodox hell, as described by Milton in Para-
dise Lost, consisted in just this alternate freezing and burning.
The case of this young man, or of any young man, seems to me at
this time to be hopeless. There is simply no chance in the world
to-day for a man to be integral, to live an entire life; he must be
divided and divided according to the divisions which obtain
.throughout the whole range of modern life.
I'see only one remedy for the class system of modern society-
that is, to reconstruct the institutions that embody the social spirit;
to create a school which is not so far removed from the workshop
as to obliterate real processes and objects-to create a workshop
which shall be so fully educative in itself that it will be a virtual
school. I can conceive that even a cigar factory might be so con-
ducted as to be instructive. If one really understood the work he
was doing, the part he was playing in the world's vast intricate
scheme of industry; or if one really knew in all its relations the
object he was handling-in this case, let us say, the history of the
"tobacco plant, such a workman would not pass as a wholly unedu-
cated man. In contact with his fellow workmen, he might develop
4t the full the life of comradeship: that human sympathy without
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