B. APPRENTICESHIP IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL ERA

"The institution of long apprenticeship has no tendency to form young people to industry"

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I (2d ed.; London, 1778), 151-153.

The institution of long apprenticeships can give no security that insufficient workmanship shall not frequently be exposed to pub lick sale. When this is done it is generally the effect of fraud, and not of inability; and the longest apprenticeship can give no security against fraud. Quite different regulations are necessary to prevent this abuse. The sterling mark upon plate, and the stamps upon linen and woollen cloth, give the purchaser much greater security than any statute of apprenticeship. He generally looks at these, but never thinks it worth while to enquire whether the workman had served a seven years apprenticeship.

The institution of long apprenticeships has no tendency to form young people to industry. A journeyman who works by the piece is likely to be industrious, because he derives a benefit from every exertion of his industry. An apprentice is likely to be idle, and almost always is so, because he has no immediate interest to be otherwise. In the inferior employments, the sweets of labour consist altogether in the recompence of labour. They who are soonest in a condition to enjoy the sweets of it, are likely soonest to conceive a relish for it, and to acquire the early habit of industry. A young man naturally conceives an aversion to labour, when for a long time he receives no benefit from it. The boys who are put out apprentices from publick charities are generally bound for more than the usual number of years, and they generally turn out very idle and worthless.

Apprenticeships were altogether unknown to the antients. The reciprocal duties of master and apprentice make a considerable article in every modern code. The Roman law is perfectly silent with regard to them. I know no Greek or Latin word (I might venture, I believe, to assert that there is none) which expresses the idea we now annex to the word Apprentice, a servant bound to work at a particular trade for the benefit of a master, during a term of years, upon condition that the master shall teach him that trade.

Long apprenticeships are altogether unnecessary. The arts, which are much superior to common trades, such as those of making clocks and watches, contain no such mystery as to require a long course of instruction. The first invention of such beautiful machines, indeed, and even that of some of the ,instruments employed in making them, must, no doubt, have been the work of deep thought and long time, and may justly be considered as among the happiest efforts of human ingenuity. But when both have been fairly invented and are well understood, to explain to any young man, in the compleatest manner, how to apply the instruments and how to construct the machines, cannot well require more than the lessons of a few weeks: perhaps those of a few days might be sufficient. In the common mechanick trades, those of a few days might certainly be sufficient. The dexterity of hand, indeed, even in common trades, cannot be acquired without much practice and experience. But a young man would practice with much more diligence and attention, if from the beginning he wrought as a journeyman, being paid in proportion to the little work which he could execute, and paying in his turn for the materials which he might sometimes spoil through awkwardness and inexperience. His education would generally in this way be more effectual, and always less tedious and expensive. The master, indeed, would be a loser. He would lose all the wages of the apprentice, which he now saves, for seven years together. In the end, perhaps, the apprentice himself would be a loser. In a trade so easily learnt he would have more competitors, and his wages, when he came to be a compleat workman, would be much less than at present. The same increase of competition would reduce the profits of the masters as well as the wages of the workmen. The trades, the crafts, the mysteries, would all be losers. But the public would be a gainer, the work of all artificers coming in this way much cheaper to market.

1. Master mechanics accused of employing apprentices instead of journeymen

Mechanics' Free Press, Nov. 23,1828.

Masters and Apprentices. Messrs. Editors – The practice of many master mechanics in this city [Philadelphia] in employing none but apprentices in their manufacturing establishments, is an evil severely felt by the journeymen of all denominations; for whenever there is a greater number of mechanics than the demand of labour requires, it is evident the surplus must be thrown out of employ. There are men in this city who have from 15 to 20 apprentices, who never or very seldom have a journeyman in their shops; but to supply the place of journeymen, and to monopolize to themselves trade and wealth, as one apprentice becomes free, another is taken to fill up the ranks. . .

When we bind our sons for five, six or seven years, to learn a trade, it is with an idea that when he has faithfully served out the term of his apprenticeship, he will be enabled at least to find employment as a journeyman. This reasonable expectation very often ends in disappointment; for the very moment he assumes his independence his troubles begin: he is thrown out of employment by his parsimonious and ungenerous master, with whom no consideration of past services has any weight, and whose heart can melt at the sight of nothing but money.

. . . He must now either turn his attention to some laborious work, to which he has not been accustomed, and which is at times difficult to obtain, or turn vagabond at once. It is no wonder that so many young men, under such unfavorable circumstances, are ruined in their morals and reputations, and the world is too apt to throw all the blame upon the unfortunate, while they pass over with impunity the causes that produced it.

There are other master mechanics who are less fortunate than the former; they do much injury to society, without enriching or benefiting themselves. These are men who manufacture goods altogether by apprentices, and sell them at so very Iowa rate, that they can scarcely live by the profits.

One of the above description was selling some hats, some time ago, and another of the trade asked him how he could afford to sell them so very low. His answer was, that if he had not had them manufactured altogether by apprentices, he could not have afforded to have sold them for anything like the price. These men appear to me to injure others without benefiting themselves.

I hope, Messrs. Editors, that some philanthropic spirit will dictate some lawful means to eradicate and destroy such deadly poison, circulated throughout the veins of society, and if it cannot be finally rooted out, let us employ the best antidote we can. Let us do good in our day and generation, by establishing societies for the protection and help of such unfortunate young men as I have already sufficiently spoken of. If all were master mechanics, there would be no more labour performed than there is at present; but there would be a more equal distribution of the profits of that labour among the members of society; and consequently would destroy the powerful influence of monopolists.

2. Apprenticeship as a state of bondage, 1829 Mechanics' Free Press, Sept. 26, 1829.

. . . Unless it can be made appear, that apprenticeship is instituted and maintained for the benefit of the apprentice, during the term of his apprenticeship, and also during his subsequent life; the institution must be abolished. . . No benefit, either real or supposed, to capitalists will be sufficient to uphold a state of bondage, during a period equal to one tenth of an extremely long life, unless it shall be fully made to appear that the bondsman comes in for a certain advantage which he could not have obtained without incurring the bondage.

3. Half-trained boys replace journeymen printers, 1845

New York Daily Tribune, Sept. 11, 1845.

For the journeyman printers' protest in 1811 see above Part Two, Chap. II, sec. A, The making of a printer, 1809-1826, doc. 2.

Although there is very little, if any, regular apprenticing to the business now, every Printing Office has its quota of boys, ranging in number from one to twenty, or more, according to the method and extent of its operations. These boys receive from $1 50 to $2 00 per week, for one or two years – when, if they become at all skillful in the art of type-setting, they are permitted to work on their own hook as two thirders, at 18% and 20 cents per thousand, and thus oust from their legitimate places regular journeymen. If the boy has become remarkably quick and correct in composition, he can readily obtain a situation at from five to seven dollars per week – in every instance usurping the place of another, and not unfrequently that of a man of family. This is an evil with which the journeymen are forced to contend at odds, as this class of interlopers is constantly accumulating from the surrounding country and by foreign influx.

4. Apprenticeship and delinquency, 1846

Boston, Common Council, "Report of the Directors of the House of Industry and Reformation," City Doc. No. 14 (Boston, 1846), pp. 9-10.

Another embarrassment results from the change in public sentiment and practice, especially in some parts of Massachusetts, in regard to apprenticeship. Formerly mechanic's apprentices served a full term of seven years, resided in the families of their masters, and received moral as well as mechanical instruction. The system produced thorough mechanics, and well disciplined, thrifty young men. At the present time mechanics employ boys and young men, at particular branches of trade, for limited or uncertain periods, allowing them to board where they may, and conduct themselves, when away from their workshops, as they will. This usage must be injurious to the young who are often changing their places, and produces discontent among regular apprentices who are subjected to wholesome restraint.

The Directors have many opportunities to see the favorable effects of judicious apprenticeship. Committees of the Board make occasional visits to apprentices, particularly in neighborhoods where several are located, and they have been pleased to find the majority doing well and in good hands. The effect of these visits is believed to be beneficial both to masters and apprentices. And the Directors are often gratified by visits of former apprentices from both Houses, promising young men, already established in honorable callings, and proving good citizens. In several instances within a few years children have been placed with masters, who were themselves apprenticed by our predecessors.

Delinquents from the New York House of Refuge indentured as apprentices

Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, Eighth Annual Report, 1832 (New York, 1833), p. 44.

    The 116 that have been indentured during the past year, have been put to the following trades and business, viz:

Girls -           To Housewifery, 37

Boys -          To Farmers, 29

                                                                    ______

                                                                          116

1. The impact of technology, 1855

Edward Everett Hale, "The State's Care of Its Children," in Hale, et al.,

Prize Essays on Juvenile Delinquency (Philadelphia, 1855), pp. 13-14.

Modern arrangements of manufacture and commerce, tempt men to abandon the old systems of apprenticeship, and also give children a distaste to them. The simple processes, for which machines can be made available in the arts, are precisely those which once made the early years of young apprenticeship valuable. The introduction of the planing machine, for instance, has fixed a later period in life, than custom formerly fixed, for the beginning of an apprenticeship in carpentry. The machine does what the boys in a shop used to do. On the other hand, a boy, who can earn two or three dollars a week in tending an envelope machine, disdains to go to learn a trade, in an apprenticeship which will pay him nothing more than the cost of his food and clothing in its first year. But at the end of a few years, he is nothing but an over-grown boy, fit to tend that machine. He has learned little else. And that want of training has been, in itself, enough to train him as a vagabond, unless counteracted by other influences.

Under the best legislative systems yet attempted, this difficulty is inherent in the arrangements of factory labor which employs children. Under the Massachusetts statutes for instance, all persons who employ children, are obliged to send them to school thirteen weeks, at least, in a year. The statute is generally enforced and obeyed. But although the education of the children in reading, writing and arithmetic, is thus provided for, their gradual training to employments fit for men and women is, in most instances, not provided for. Of the processes of machinery in which children are made of use, there are very few which introduce them to the more complicated processes, such as those which men and women are employed for.

A like misfortune befalls boys or girls, who are engaged in peddling newspapers or other small wares, as so many are, in our larger towns.

It is, in a word, the necessary evil, accompanying every employment, which confines a child to a single duty, without giving him an opportunity to watch and learn more difficult processes connected with it.

It results, as has been said, in training boys and girls, who at last, dissatisfied with their childish industry, turn to dishonest gains for their compensation.

2. "Apprenticeship as our fathers knew it is dying," 1870

James Shields Whitney, "Apprenticeship and a Boy's Prospect of a Livelihood," in Social Science Association of Philadelphia, Papers of 1872 (Philadelphia, 1872), pp. 12-20.

James S. Whitney, member of the Board of Public Education of the First District of Pennsylvania and member of the Central High School Committee, analyzed the apprenticeship problem from an educational point of view.

The number of men and women employed in the manufactories of this city in 1870, as carefully collected by Mr. Lorin Blodget, was 127,590, of which the men are 72 per cent. The total number of "youths" employed was 10,286; and supposing the boys to be in the proportion of 60 per cent., there will be 6,172 of them.

Of these a very large number are children below the age of 16, the lowest age of apprentices, and many are not in any sense apprentices, so that the male "learners of trades" must be expressed by a much smaller number. The census report gives 5,832 as the "total number of apprentices," boys and girls, which no doubt includes many besides apprentices proper, while it is not likely to omit many of them. Taking the boys at 60 per cent., we have 3,500 as the extreme number of male apprentices in this city in 1870. There are about 8,000 establishments in which men and boys are employed, and 92,112 workingmen in shops. The apprentices, therefore, cannot exceed the proportion of 1 to every 2_ shops, and to every 26 workmen - a proportion not equal to the requirements of the guilds, or the allowance of the trades-unions. As the number of boys between the ages of 16 and 21 must be at least 25,000, of whom not over 3,000 are in school or college, it would seem that the small number of apprentices cannot be due to a deficiency of material.

But why do not the boys learn trades? This question, already answered, generally needs more specific reply. In the first place, boys are human; and in the second place, they are boys. Unfortunately, their parents are human, too, and the natural indisposition to hard work, and the preference for clean hands and clothes, is not always discouraged by parental ambition. The class of whom this may be said, though it may need it more, deserves not so much our sympathy as another, where ambition or necessity obliges the father to forego some of this indulgence, that the son may aid him in the support of the family, or be fitted to maintain another. Perhaps it is a mother, alone but for the boy, who is forced into the unnatural position of his parent's adviser, in deciding the momentous question of a trade. There are long discussions as to whether the family purse can bear the strain of the first two or three years, while the boy earns only his own board; and all choice must often be subordinated to the necessity of taking the trade which pays best and soonest. The first decision is perhaps for that of a machinist, which seems to have a great attraction for most boys. Yes, and our hero finds on the books of the larger establishments to which he first applies forty or fifty names already entered, waiting their turn. He cannot wait six months or a year, besides he finds that in the large shops frequently a boy works during his whole term on a few machines and does not learn the whole "handcraft." He goes to the smaller shops where the applicants are fewer, but the vacancies are fewer still. He asks a neighboring carpenter and builder for a place. But this trade does not take boys. The work is all prepared in mills, by men who have learned carpentering in the old times, or who have learned to attend a single machine, and there is nothing for a boy to do. He may not be strong enough for blacksmithing, and there are few boys wanted in the shops where general work is done, as the steam hammer can be both boy and man.

The bricklayers also seem "not to approve of boys" – as the master can oversee them but little, from the nature of the employment; bad work is a serious thing to remedy; and the contract system of building requires great economy and dispatch. Only boys who can stand hard work, too, need apply. With both bricklayers and plasterers there is a prejudice against boys, as so many unfaithful learners have brought discredit on the name. Our hero asks to be a moulder; there is a better opening here, and the wages are good - beginning with $3.50 or $4.00 per week - but almost anywhere but in this city (and here, too, until a few years ago), the Union tells him that they allow but one apprentice to every ten men in a shop, after the one to which each shop is entitled. He has another rebuff from this source, when he asks to learn the art of printing. A rule of the Union declares that no member shall work in any newspaper office employing an apprentice, and allows in other offices only one apprentice to every five men, after the one to which each office is entitled. Repressing his ambition for the constructive arts, and that preservative of all others, our lad would be a tailor, or shoemaker. But scarcely anyone will take apprentices at these trades. I am told that it is doubtful whether there is in this city an apprentice in the former - and that there are probably not over a dozen shops employing them in the latter. The work among tailors is done by men, mostly of foreign birth, each employing a female helper or two. But the best of the "foreign talent" does not immigrate, for of the 3,000 sewing tailors in the city, only about 300 are capable of the finest work. Notwithstanding the lack of learners among shoemakers, however, their Union forbids the employment in the shoe factories (where wages of $25 per week are often made, and the greater part of the shoes for city and country trade) of any but those who have learned the art, at least so as to be able to make in some sort a shoe. Of course, the supply must be kept up by importation, or by half-educated home-learners tempted by the high wages, to work a year or two at the bench as apprentices. The bricklayers' and plasterers' Unions, too, have their restrictive rules, but they are not now enforced. The hatters have their's and enforce them, I believe.

You will be as weary as our hero with further illustrations of this part of my subject. It is sufficient to say that in the majority of cases the boy is forced by necessity, or drawn by the prospect of greater immediate wages, to work in a bolt or umbrella factory, a type foundry or some such establishment, where he is paid "by the piece," and can earn five or six dollars, or more, per week. He becomes a man, but he cannot maintain a family even on wages that allowed him to dress showily when off work; he has learned no trade that will bring him more; and is obliged to give place to another generation of boys glad to take what he has outgrown. He becomes in a small way an adventurer, seeking for pay that represents an education which he has not; and often swells the number of incompetent artisans, a "dangerous class" who do our poor work of various kinds.

We have supposed the case of a boy who wishes, or whose parents wish him, to learn a trade. But what of that large class not above the necessity of labor, and who have no one who will or can procure them places? There are about five thousand of them here, enough to form at least the nucleus of a still more dangerous class. Many of these, through a kind Providence, and some act of their own or their parents, find their way to the House of Refuge, or they are taken into some "Home," whence they are provided with places to learn trades, or at least make a living. But let no boy, disheartened in his efforts to find such a place, look with jealous eye on the graduates of the House of Refuge. Few of them are apprenticed to handicrafts, the wages of which rapidly supply the place of capital. Out of thirty-nine boys indentured in 1870, twenty-seven were placed with farmers and ten were divided among seven trades. Out of forty in 1871, twenty-six went to farmers and eleven to nine trades. The balance in each year went to occupations other than trades.

We have looked at this matter chiefly as regards the boys' interest. But it has a larger, a national aspect. The scarcity of skilled labor is a direct loss of productive power, and so far a national waste.

In whatever way, therefore, we regard it, the evil is a serious one. No class is more fully sensible of this than workingmen, now employers, who served their apprenticeship twenty or thirty years ago, when indentures were more frequently made and respected. These say that they do not see where the skilled workers of the future are to come from. This is specially true of the trades where manual skill and strength have not been replaced by machinery. The boys who generally offer themselves for these are not such as employers feel safe in accepting. At present we obtain a large number of mechanics by immigration. Of 17,857 male immigrants for whom the labor bureau at Castle Garden, New York, found places in 1870, 3,186, say one-sixth, were mechanics. Almost all of these were settled in New York city, or its neighborhood. The trades chiefly represented were: shoemakers, 345; tailors, 315; cabinet-makers, 371; making about one-third of the whole. No doubt, of the large number not helped by this agency, many were also mechanics, and of sufficient means to be able to dispense with aid. But the same causes are at work abroad as here, as we have shown, to lower the standard of good work; and there may come a time when the student of social elegance as well as of social science may have as much reason to complain of the quality as of the price of his coat and his boots.

In what direction shall we look for a remedy for all this? To the laws of supply and demand? But these laws, if any, have superseded during the last fifty years the old apprentice laws, and to this pass are we come. . . To leave this matter to regulate itself is to leave it to the contending interests of employers and employed, which had so large a share in the breaking up of the old system. I do not enlarge upon the laws of the trade unions, because they are only a feature of this struggle. They are the narrow, but natural expression of the supposed interests of one class, in opposition to movements sometimes similar, sometimes supposed to be so, of the other. The boys, for whom I speak to-night, are in the interest of neither party, and of both; they are the children of the employer as well as of the workman, and may grow up interchangeably into either. And in their name I ask, Where is the larger spirit to which they may appeal from the three obstacles – themselves, the workman and the employer – blocking the door to apprenticeship and self-maintenance?

It may be said that the less Government interferes with labor the better – and why should it concern itself to find work for children rather than any other class? It might be answered, because they are children; but I prefer to rest my plea on the broader ground that this is not in itself a question of labor, but of education.

. . . I would have our public schools give to their pupils sucl1 a knowledge of tools, and of the simpler processes of the manual arts, that a boy could enter upon these on the same footing that he can obtain a clerkship in a store, receiving wages that will enable him to form at once the habit of accumulation, because he will be of value to his employer from the beginning. Where there should be no necessity for immediate entrance on labor, a taste formed in the rudimentary school could be cultivated in higher technical schools, controlled or aided by government.

The subdivision of old trades into specialties, which grow into new trades, and the increased use of machinery, are arguments even better than Dr. Adam Smith's, a century ago, against long apprenticeship; and the same degree of skill can be gained in less time, where to learn and to teach are the ends, than where the labor is a matter of wages, and learning an incident. This instruction in handicraft would not conflict with that in letters. It is found in England that children employed in factories and receiving school instruction alternately are better scholars as well as better workers. It is well known that our country schools, kept through the winter only, and made up of boys who work on farms during the summer, will compare favorably with city schools, whose only recess is a long holiday. The training of the eye and the hand by drawing, measuring, handling forms and materials, cannot but have a beneficial reaction on the mind; and the learning how to work, which is something different from bodily exercise, is a most desirable preparation for any position in life.

There was a time when an artisan who could no more than read and write was an exception. To extend the limits of the learning that comes from books among workingmen was the first object of the public school. It has achieved the object; but those whom it reaches do not remain of the class of workingmen. This is not stated as an objection to the system, yet if among the thousands of workmen's children who are its subjects a small minority become skilled artisans, there is certainly a want left unsupplied, if not created; and a fear may be expressed that the community is being educated away from labor. Out of 52 lads graduating from the Philadelphia Central High School in 1848, but 7 were engaged in mechanical employments some fourteen years afterwards. Out of 38 graduating in 1867, 21 became clerks, 6 salesmen, and 4 mechanics. Of 54 graduating in 1856, 30 became clerks and salesmen, and 11 mechanics. In each case, the total number includes all of whom any record could be made. The usual graduating age is about 17 years. It may be said that the pupils of the High School are not generally from the working class; but employers say that when they served their time, apprentices came very largely from the class corresponding to that whose sons graduate from the High School. The statistics of Girard College may be expected to be different, but of the 221 former pupils who were apprentices on Dec. 31 st last, about one-half only, including 26 printers, engravers, etc., were learning mechanical trades. Human progress is always by exaggerated and reactive movements; and it may be that the time has come to revert to the instruction in labor of those who formed y had little other instruction. It is certainly too late to say that government has nothing to do with education. That point has been fixed, and we are passing on to another. It will soon be too late, we hope, to say that government has nothing to do with education, further than parents desire. And certainly education will not need to be any the more "compulsory" when it holds out the prospect of knowledge of a trade as well as of books.

It is too late, too, to say that the teaching of trades in schools is a new and untried notion. Industrial and technical schools, in Germany and France, have shown that it is practicable to instruct youths in this way in the manual arts, as well as polytechnic schools, here and abroad, can teach them the applied sciences. And even at home the principle of combining the study of letters and of handicrafts is illustrated in our reform schools, and in some of our benevolent institutions. Why should the State forbear to do that preventively which she does, to some extent, punitively? Why should not the children who have their natural protectors be, at least, as well provided for as those who have lost them?

I do not propose to dwell upon the details of this suggestion. My object will have been accomplished if it be fairly realized that apprenticeship, as our fathers knew it, is dying, and naturally; that it belongs to a state of society which will probably never return, and that to lament its decay is as absurd as to mourn for the middle ages; yet, that the want which it supplied is more imperative than ever, and that there is no power but the State itself – the true Guild – that can build anew and on broader foundations the complete system of learning the true Apprenticeship.

3. "I do not desire my sons to follow the same trade"

Massachusetts, Senate, "Report on the Statistics of Labor," Doc. 120, Documents, 1870 (Boston, 1870), pp. 270-271.

APPRENTICESHIP.

74. How did you acquire a knowledge of your present trade or employment? whether by serving an apprenticeship, or by what other means; and do you teach your sons (if any) the same trade, or desire them to follow it.

Office No. 86. An Iron Moulder. "Learnt by apprenticeship. I do not desire my sons to follow the same trade."

Office No. 42. A Woollen Weaver, English. "Learnt my trade from my parents."

Office No. 103. A Carpenter. "I served four years with my father. My own three sons have no desire to learn the trade, nor would I desire them to do so."

Office No. 26. A Shoe Inspector. "Have worked at shoemaking fifteen years; never served an apprenticeship; began on cheapest kind of work, and worked my way up to a skilled workman by my own energy, close application, and desire to be as good as anybody. Should not desire my son to learn shoemaking; think it a very poor trade at present time, owing to the large number of persons unemployed the greater portion of the year; consider the trade very injurious to health."

Office No.3. A Bootmaker. "Served an apprenticeship of three months to learn a part of the trade; satisfied that my children will go at it, as I expect that the business will improve; there are too many at it now, and not work enough for eight months in the year and that at miserable wages; when work is plenty, have to work when we should be in bed, or reading, or gaining necessary knowledge, or teaching our children that they may be properly brought up."

REMARKS.

From the above replies, and many similar, it is manifest that as general rule, parents prefer that their trade should not be the trade of their children.

Should people trained in factories be classed as indentured apprentices?

Massachusetts, Senate, "Report on Labor," pp. 356-357.

Office No. 51 says, in reference to question 74: "There don't seem to be any rules in this town, or in fact, in any of the small towns, in regard to apprentices. There is not work enough in winter to guarantee the binding of an apprentice for either one or three years. When I first went to work, my employer said he would pay my board for a few weeks until he could see how I would 'break in;' at the end of a few weeks he agreed to hire me and give me $1.50 per day, as long as he had work. I averaged about $30 a month for seven months, then the work got slack, so I had to look for a factory job for the winter, as I did not have enough earned to keep me the remaining five months. I got work in a factory until the following spring, when I left and began to work for my old employer on my second year, at $2 per day. Things were pretty much the same; I had to find another job in winter, and last spring I came back to my old employer on my third year, for $2.25 per day, with the previous understanding of getting work while he had it. I am now idle, this being a dull winter for factory business.

"For my part, I think it is no worse to get a trade so, than to be regularly indentured for three years; and if the question were asked me by other than the Labor Bureau, if I served an apprenticeship, I should answer yes! But to you, gentlemen, I give the details, for there is many others at this (house painting) as well as other trades, that learn them as above stated. I should like to know if, in your opinion, we that learn trades as I have above stated, should not be worthy of being classed with those who have papers of apprenticeship to show, 'provided we can do as good a job of work' as they can?

"No youth should migrate to a city without a thorough mastery of some good mechanical trade"

Horace Greeley, Hints Toward Reforms (New York, 1850), pp. 185-188,361,362.

When a poor youth, who has devoted every hour of his time, every farthing of his means, to the acquirement of what is called a Liberal Education, finds himself afloat on the great sea without a haven before him - no call for him in any professional capacity, no influential friends to make a position - no fitness, but rather decided unfitness, for usefulness in any mechanical vocation - and has the simple choice afforded him, to beg, starve, or turn his acquirements to some gainful but infamous use – there is another victim of Social injustice.

– 'But do you contend that no American youth should ever migrate from the country to one of our Cities?' No, Sir, I do not. What I do maintain is this - Whoever leaves the country to come hither should feel sure that he has faculties, capacities, powers, for which the Country affords him no scope, and that the City is his proper sphere of usefulness. He should next be sure that he has ability to procure a livelihood while he shall be laboring to attain that sphere which he regards as his ultimate destination. No youth should migrate to a city without a thorough mastery of some good mechanical trade or handicraft such as is prosecuted in cities, although he may not intend to follow it except in case of dire necessity. . .

The young man fit to come to a City does not begin by importuning some relative or friend to find or make a place for him. Having first qualified himself, so far as he may, for usefulness here, he comes understanding that he must begin at the foot of the class and work his way up. Having found a place to stop, he makes himself acquainted with those places where work in his line may be found, sees the advertisements of "wants" in the leading journals at an early hour each morning, notes those which hold out some prospect for him, and accepts the first place offered him which he can take honorably and fill acceptably. He who commences in this way is quite likely to get on.

1. Education as "the true road to independence"

M. M. Noah, Address at the Apprentice's Library, September 23,1850

(New York, 1850), pp. 7-10,14,15.

. . . The time has arrived, when it has become apparent that the destinies of our country are finally to be placed under the control of the Mechanics and Labouring Men of the Union...

The President of the United States was a mechanic – an apprentice boy, as many of our hearers have been; true, in after life he studied law, and was a successful practitioner, but he carried into that study, and into that practice, and into that high station which he now adorns, the elements of patient industry, hard study, economical habits, and persevering labour, acquired when he was an apprentice. Should not this important fact stimulate us to aid the apprentice in educating himself, in strengthening his mind, and enlarging his sphere of usefulness . . .

It is our duty, therefore, to place this Mechanics' Society, and this Apprentices' Library, among the great and benevolent institutions of our city. . .

A Library, judiciously selected, is the Garden of Eden, in which is planted the tree of useful knowledge, the fruit of which is life, not death.

I have long urged wealthy parents to throw aside false pride, and make their sons Mechanics instead of Lawyers, Physicians and Divines: the bar is crowded and unprofitable, medicine is also overstocked with practitioners, and the pulpit has many laborious and poorly paid pastors. If we improve hereafter as rapidly as we heretofore have done, these professions and pursuits will be simplified, and we shall find that every man can be his own lawyer, his own doctor, and in his own domestic circle, with that great and good book, the Bible, he can become his, in part, own preacher; but a knowledge of the Mechanical Arts, steadily and industriously carried out, must in this great and increasing country, be for ever the source of profit, and the true road to independence. This Library, therefore, is the great platform on which a high moral and intellectual character may be formed. When the labour of the day is over, instead of the apprentice scouring the streets, visiting bar-rooms or theatres, mingling with idle, vicious companions, he takes his seat in this Library, with a rich intellectual repast before him, or, being privileged to take a book home with him, he trims his lamp and reads aloud to his little brothers and sisters, scattering the good seeds among them, to take root hereafter. To-night he invites himself to pass the evening with the elegant Addison, to morrow night he spends with Goldsmith, or Doctor Johnson, or Smollet, or Gibbon, the society of eminent and illustrious men, whom it is his pride to know from the rich emanations of their genius. If he wishes to travel, he sets out with Anson and Captain Cook, and makes a voyage around the world. . .

2. "Many children. . . never received an hour's education"

New York, Select Committee of the Senate Appointed to Visit Charitable Institutions, Report, 1857 (Albany, 1857), pp.216-217.

"I have found many children bound out by the superintendents who never received an hour's education during their apprenticeship, and who, at the age of twenty-one were cast loose on the world no better than the heathen. How can children brought up in this way be expected to become anything else than criminals or paupers, and fathers and mothers of criminals and paupers? They have no ambition to acquire property, and if they had, they have no means to acquire it. They cannot enter into trade, because in order to do this with any success they must be able to read, write and cypher, and this they cannot do.

Efficient rules should be adopted to guard against abuses in the apprenticeship of pauper children. Full enquiries should be made as to the character of the proposed master, and the answer should be made a matter of record. The parents or friends of the apprentice should be cited to attend, and their objections, if any, should be recorded and carefully weighed. The master should not be allowed to remove the apprentice from the town where he was originally bound without the consent in writing of the superintendents. The indentures should fully declare the duties of the master and provide for a proper amount of schooling and the provision of the necessary school books."

Samuel Gompers joins a union

Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, I (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1925), 33, 170.

Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), organizer and president of the American Federation of Labor, started work at age ten as an apprentice for a shoemaker in London. He switched immediately, however, to cigar making because of his father's activity in the Cigarmakers' Society. The Gompers family sailed to the United States in 1863. In New York, young Gompers worked with his father, who started to make cigars at home. He was fourteen years old when he joined his first union.

In 1864 I joined the Cigarmakers' Local Union No. 15 which was the English-speaking union of New York City. This organization was not strong. There was also Union No. 90 of German-speaking cigarmakers which was affiliated to the German Labor Union that met in the Tenth Ward Hotel. All my life I had been accustomed to the labor movement and accepted as a matter of course that every wage-earner should belong to the union of his trade. I did not yet have a conscious appreciation of the labor movement. My awakening was to come later. However, I attended union meetings and observed union regulations.