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An illegitimate business promotes temporarily the financial interests of the individual at the expense of the health, morals and wealth of the public. In my public and private examinations I have directed thousands of young men and women into channels of legitimate business. The fact is, there is such a tremendous demand for skilled labor in all departments of legitimate employment that it is difficult to find material to fill it. We hear much of the warfare between capital and labor, and strikes frequently paralyze the channels of legitimate trade, but the cause of the difficulty lies not in any real or imaginary conflict between capital and labor. The solution lies in the fact that every branch of legitimate labor is burdened with incompetent workmen, men who are in wrong occupations, who were never intended by nature for such work as the branches of trade they infest, and the skilled workmen are obliged to carry the load; while capital is often in the hands of those unfit to be trusted with its use, who manipulate it merely as the instrument of oppression and wrong, until the social discord is produced. If men were all graded to their proper vocations, if capital were entrusted only to those of financial skill, and labor, in its various departments, assigned to those of proper qualifications, every man would be employed at a fair remuneration, and the burden of pauperism would fall from the backs of our skilled workmen. There are too many men in the learned professions who would do better at the forge and on the farm. There are preachers who ought to be blacksmiths, and lawyers who would look better and feel better hoeing potatoes. There are those at the anvil and the plow who can succeed better in literature and art.
[Illustration: Lawyer.]
Young man, it is infinitely more to your credit to be a successful blacksmith, if that is in accordance with your endowment, respected by everybody within a radius of twenty miles because you can shoe a horse better than anybody else, than it is to be starvin