uld be
necessarily apprenticed during some years of his education. There
would be room, in these four trades alone, for nearly every grade of
practical intelligence and productive imagination.

133. But it should not be artists alone who are exercised early in
these crafts. It would be part of my scheme of physical education that
every youth in the state--from the King's son downwards,--should learn
to do something finely and thoroughly with his hand, so as to let him
know what _touch_ meant; and what stout craftsmanship meant; and to
inform him of many things besides, which no man can learn but by some
severely accurate discipline in doing. Let him once learn to take a
straight shaving off a plank, or draw a fine curve without faltering,
or lay a brick level in its mortar; and he has learned a multitude of
other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him. He might
choose his craft, but whatever it was, he should learn it to some
sufficient degree of true dexterity: and the result would be, in after
life, that among the middle classes a good deal of their house
furniture would be made, and a good deal of rough work, more or less
clumsily, but not ineffectively, got through, by the master himself
and his sons, with much furtherance of their general health and peace
of mind, and increase of innocent domestic pride and pleasure, and to
the extinction of a great deal of vulgar upholstery and other mean
handicraft.

134. Farther. A great deal of the vulgarity, and nearly all the vice,
of retail commerce, involving the degradation of persons occupied in
it, depends simply on the fact that their minds are always occupied by
the vital (or rather mortal) question of profits. I should at once put
an end to this source of baseness by making all retail dealers merely
salaried officers in the employ of the trade guilds; the stewards,
that is to say, of the salable properties of those guilds, and
purveyors of such and such articles to a given number of families. A
perfectly well-educated person might, without the least degradation,
hold such an office as this, however poorly paid; and it would be
precisely the fact of his being well educated which would enable him
to fulfil his duties to the public without the stimulus of direct
profit. Of course the current objection to such a system would be that
no man, for a regularly paid salary, would take pains to please his
customers; and the answer to that objection is, that if you