e
working period in your day. Your workshops were filled with children
and old men, but we hold the period of youth sacred to education, and
the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag,
equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation. The period of
industrial service is twenty-four years, beginning at the close of
the course of education at twenty-one and terminating at forty-five.
After forty-five, while discharged from labor, the citizen still
remains liable to special calls, in case of emergencies causing a
sudden great increase in the demand for labor, till he reaches the age
of fifty-five, but such calls are rarely, in fact almost never, made.
The fifteenth day of October of every year is what we call Muster Day,
because those who have reached the age of twenty-one are then mustered
into the industrial service, and at the same time those who, after
twenty-four years' service, have reached the age of forty-five, are
honorably mustered out. It is the great day of the year with us,
whence we reckon all other events, our Olympiad, save that it is
annual."

CHAPTER VII.

"It is after you have mustered your industrial army into service," I
said, "that I should expect the chief difficulty to arise, for there
its analogy with a military army must cease. Soldiers have all the
same thing, and a very simple thing, to do, namely, to practice the
manual of arms, to march and stand guard. But the industrial army must
learn and follow two or three hundred diverse trades and avocations.
What administrative talent can be equal to determining wisely what
trade or business every individual in a great nation shall pursue?"

"The administration has nothing to do with determining that point."

"Who does determine it, then?" I asked.

"Every man for himself in accordance with his natural aptitude, the
utmost pains being taken to enable him to find out what his natural
aptitude really is. The principle on which our industrial army is
organized is that a man's natural endowments, mental and physical,
determine what he can work at most profitably to the nation and most
satisfactorily to himself. While the obligation of service in some
form is not to be evaded, voluntary election, subject only to
necessary regulation, is depended on to determine the particular sort
of service every man is to render. As an individual's satisfaction
during his term of service depends on his having an occupation to his
taste, p