ITEMS OF INTEREST March 7, 1908 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

The of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education says: "Boys and girls, young men and young women, are not only not directed toward the trades in our existing schools, but are often actually directed away from them by the bookish education of those schools and their purely academic traditions. Manual training is not industrial training, and should not be confused with it. Industrial training means vocational training in trades and agriculture. It aims to develop industrial intelligence and skill in particular vocations. It does not make a journeyman, but gives each worker at a skilled vocation a training that enables him to earn a living wage at eighteen or nineteen. There is need of industrial schools to supplement the existing public schools, such schools to receive pupils fourteen or fifteen years of age, who declare their intention to learn a trade, and offering a course of study covering four years of instruction. The first two years would comprise general shop instruction with related drawing, mathematics, natural science, the history of industry and commerce, shop and business English, and the reading of appropriate articles and books. The last two years would give the shop instruction for particular trades; and for each trade represented the drawing, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and history of that trade, civics, and English, treated as concretely as possible."

Dr. Benjamin F. Trueblood, secretary of the American Peace Society, sent to Congress last week the following remonstrance against the further increase of the navy, signed by about fifty business men of Boston: "To the Congress of the United States: We, business men of the city of Boston and vicinity, sympathizing with the endeavors made by our representatives at the last Hague Conference to reach an international agreement for the limitation of armaments, and believing that the United States should take the lead in this movement by example as well as by argument, earnestly remonstrate against the further increase of the navy. We deprecate the display of physical force as a misrepresentation of the best sentiments of our people, and as likely to lessen the influence of the United States in its mission of peace and good will among all nations. In the name of the great common interests of commerce, in the name of the millions of our citizens who already bear the burden of needless taxation, and on whom the burden of any increase of armaments will chiefly fall, in the name of the other nations who are looking to the United States for moral support in the policy of international friendliness and trust, we protest against the building of the proposed four new battleships as an uncalled for and backward measure." A similar petition, signed by Bishop Potter of New York and other clergymen, has also been laid before the Senate.

The question whether the railroad rate law known as the Hepburn Act, repeals section one of the Elkins Act, prohibiting rebates by railroads, was involved in the case of the Great Northern Railway Company vs. the United States, and has been decided by the Supreme Court of the United States against the railroad company and against the contention of such repeal. The Standard Oil Company, which was fined twenty-nine million dollars, and other corporations, claimed that the Hepburn Act repealed the Elkins Law.

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