STUDENT AND LABORER

Self-made men have many of them adopted the principle that their sons should go into the factory and "learn the business from the ground up". Thus innumerable scions of wealthy American families have been transplanted from the flower bed of college to the vegetable patch of industry-and usually with beneficial results. Last spring The Nation advanced the theory that the whole body of college students are fit candidates for such stringent routine that they may face the "realities of industrial America." Therefore The Nation offered prizes to undergraduates who should perform manual labor during the summer of 1925 and describe their experiences in an essay. The winning articles are now being published, the first one written by a woman student of Antioch College who worked in three different factories successively ladling jam into bottles, slipping candy into little frilled cups, and finally behind a mountain of books in a bindery examining each volume for imperfections. The essay amply justifies The Nation's experiment and the theory upon which it is based.

The gulf between college students and the great hordes of American industrial workers is vast; only in isolated individual instances is it crossed. The social and political outlook of the country's educated classes is monumental evidence of the insularity of the average college graduate in the midst of a nation of factory girls, steel workers, miners and lumberjacks. The humanitarian spirit in America has made great strides in the last half century, but to too small an extent has it been grounded on a just understanding of the actualities of the workers' existence. Even future captains of industry who sift up through the ranks gain a somewhat distorted picture of their own experience.

The social thinking of America needs to root itself in roulettes. If the experiences which The Nation's contestants have undergone were common to great numbers of college undergraduates it would not be too much to expect a virtual revolution in their political and economic creeds. A summer in a canning factory can cure for a lifetime as well impracticable economic idealism as the more common fault of a callous social conscience.