I say send 'em to work young
and let 'em sweat. That's what makes men and women."
My dear sir, those early New Englanders were in trade schools
from the time they began to crawl on the floor among their
mothers' looms and spinning-wheels. There was hardly a home in
early New England that didn't give a large number of technical
courses in which men and women were always teaching by doing, and
the boys and girls were always learning by imitating.
The facts about this are so simple and so familiar that we don't
stop to think of their meaning. When in the spring the wood-ashes
from the winter fires were poured into the lye-barrel, and water
was poured in with them, and the lye began to trickle out from
the bottom of the barrel, and the winter's savings of grease were
brought out, and the grease and the lye were boiled together in
the big kettle, and mother had finished making the family's
supply of soap for another year, the children had taken not only
a little lesson in industriousness, by helping to make the soap,
but a little lesson in industry, too, by observing the technique
and organization of the soap business from start to finish.
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