ery
family. Then we, too, would have a wealth of trained talent.
Comparing the riches and population of the two countries there is a
much greater proportion of university men and other competently
instructed men in Germany. Only relatively few Americans can show
diplomas for genuine and severe mental training. Take your own
Bucher family as an illustration. All its men will have sheepskins
that are worth while to show. With us, out of such a family none
would have a sheepskin, or at most one. One of the boys might have
gone to a university. And as for the difference in the women--little
comparison. Your Frau, as you have told me, has several framed
diplomas to her credit.

"You can see what a tremendous advantage all this gives the German
people over us. You have hit it very well--we are nearly always
amateurs. They are nearly always able to be professionals."

"Is it the same with the laboring classes--the mechanics and all
that?"

"The same is true, in its way. A poor American boy thinks he will
like to be a machinist. He gets a job as a new hand on a salary. He
works at it a couple of years. Then somebody offers him ten dollars
a week more to drive a truck, which is a simple, elementary task. He
drops his machinist career for this. He gets more money and it
requires no tedious training. So he remains an indifferent mechanic.
It's the money he's looking for, not the satisfaction of proficiency
in a skilled trade.

"Now, by contrast, the future of the poor German child is decided in
a fashion at about the age of ten. When a boy is elected to go into
industry, for instance, he is apprenticed at about fourteen for,
say, four years to be a mechanic. He is given no wages. In fact he
has to pay something, very often, for the opportunity to learn. But
he must, at the same time, attend what they call here continuing
schools. It is these schools, which we do not have in America, that
hold him fixed to his line of work--prevent him from jumping from
one kind of thing to another. He not only works in the shop but is
forced to go to a continuing school.

"Hence at eighteen the German factory and Government are sure to
find in him just the kind of instructed worker they need. There has
never been any danger of his meanwhile changing to driving a truck.
He sticks to his trade through life. He becomes a master mechanic.
You can't lure him away into an unskilled channel by more money.
It's not the money alone he is thinking o