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instrumental in inducing Mr. George J. Gould to take up this Western Pacific project, which is a new line to parallel the Central Pacific. Mr. Hawley and Mr. Gould became directors of the Western Pacific. As soon as Mr. Harriman learned this fact, that Mr. Gould had become identified with the Western Pacific, Mr. Gould was expelled from the Union Pacific board of directors with about as much ceremony as Mr. Harriman would have used in dismissing his stenographer. With Mr. Gould went Mr. Winslow S. Pierce, his counsel, who had been a silent enemy of Mr. Harriman for over three years.

From this also dates the loss of the Chicago & Alton. When Mr. Hawley withdrew from the Southern Pacific he went ahead and gathered in more Alton stock. What he bought, joined with the stocks bought in the open market by various members of the Rock Island group, amounted to more than half the total stock of the Alton. In spite of a frantic effort to hold it by means of a voting pool in the preferred stock, Mr. Harriman came home from Europe in 1904 to learn that his pet enemies, the Rock Island Crowd, had secured the Alton. Only recently, the offices have been moved from the Harriman office to the Rock Island, and Mr. Harriman's chairmanship has ceased.

Later Mr. Hermann Sielcken, a great coffee merchant, announced that he and some of his friends had gathered together the scattered stock of the Kansas City Southern, which had been held in the same way by Mr. Harriman, and at the next election they took the road away from the Harriman forces. After a while they issued an annual report that did not mince words in describing the methods used in the Harriman administration. Also, they took a wicked delight in cutting off that salary as chairman, which Mr. Harriman had drawn faithfully ever since it was established. According to the statement made public by the company, the road was in terrible condition when it passed out of the control of the Harriman management.

The open and above-board fights between this pugnacious financier and Messrs. James Hazen Hyde and Thomas F. Ryan are too recent to require detailed description. The latter will be dealt with in more detail in a subsequent article, in connection with the remarkable political story of Edward H. Harriman. The former is interesting for the reason that had it not occurred there would probably

have been no insurance investigation, no Armstrong Committee, no Armstrong law.

Never in all the history of finance has the subtle genius of a man been more clearly shown than in the plan which Mr. Harriman formed to "side-track" the revolution which he saw impending in the matter of insurance. The "Frick Committee" had been appointed to investigate the Equitable Life. Mr. Harriman was on it. Mr. Harriman had been a friend of James Hazen Hyde, the young man whose frivolities had first given rise to criticism. He knew that the Frick Report would arraign the behavior of this young man in no measured terms, and that it would lay at his door practically all the errors that had been committed. He called to him a Mr. Gulliver, counsel of Mr. Hyde, and made this extraordinary proposition:

that he would tell Mr. Hyde from me that if I were in his place, as a friend of his, that I would favor the adoption of the report and even to the extent of moving its adoption; that if he did, that I would stand by him through thick and thin and that I believed that every other independent conservative man on the board would; that he could state that the methods which he had pursued had been those which he found in existence when he went into the Society, and that he was young and inexperienced. perienced . . . and that he was sorry, and that if he were given an opportunity in the future to retrieve himself that he hoped the board would do so

When young Mr. Hyde learned of the nature of the report, saw that he was to be made the scapegoat of the whole Society, he rebelled. He rose in his place, instead of moving the adoption of that report, and savagely assailed Messrs. Frick and Harriman. Later, he expressed upon the witness stand his opinion of the "friendship" of E. H. Harriman in these bitter words:

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would still be in the hands of James H. Hyde, Edward H. Harriman, and their own people. The whole affair would probably have blown over and been condoned, as merely attributable. to the folly of a young man, now repentant. Instead, there came an explosion which forever took the Equitable out of the hands of Mr. Hyde, Mr. Harriman, Mr. Frick, and their associates.

This brings the record of Mr. Harriman to the beginning of the year 1906. It does not by any means close the story, for this past year has been fertile indeed in surprises. It has produced the spectacle of Mr. Harriman turning savagely upon his friend of thirty years, Stuyvesant Fish, and throwing him from his place of honor at the head of the Illinois Central. It has brought forth one of the most mysterious transactions in the history of railroading that deal whereby the all-powerful Pennsylvania stripped itself of what had been regarded as a priceless possession, to lay it at the feet of Harriman. It has witnessed the crowning event of the history of Harriman, the financier, in the declaration of great dividends on Southern Pacific and Union Pacific; and of Harriman, the politician, in the capture of a sovereign state. It has placed Edward H. Harri

man fairly and squarely before the people of the United States for judgment on his fitness for the high estate that he has made his own.

The man is hardly known outside of Wall Street, and even there the vaguest impressions dwell. That he is cruel, hard, cold, all men admit. Yet his beautiful devotion to his youngest brother, William Harriman, has become a proverb to all who knew them through the latter days of the life of that brother. He is full of strange contradictions, traits of real greatness mingling with traits of utter meanness and littleness. His ambition, his directness, his terrific force command respect and admiration. The methods by which he brings them into play are often worthy of contempt. That terrific directness, noted throughout the whole story as his salient characteristic, was described by the Wall Street Journal, early last year, in these words.:

"When the Harriman mind is once made up, that settles it. Panics may follow, boards of directors may be disrupted, officers may resign, financial powers at large may band against him, law may deny him, the money forces of the world may say him nay-but nothing matters. Isolated, regardless, persistent, defiant, and courageous, he goes upon his way, caring neither for method, law, nor man so it may be that at the end he wins the prize at which he aims!"

J

TRAINING FOR THE TRADES

THE NEXT STEP IN PUBLIC SCHOOL WORK

BY

ARTHUR W. PAGE

The

OHN CONNELLY, at nineteen, decided to become a plumber. He went from one shop to another, hoping to find a chance to learn the trade. answer was the same: Yes, they wanted help, but they preferred a boy with some experience. At last he was given a job as a helper, but his business was merely to wait on the plumber. He was an unskilled laborer, and he had no opportunity to do any instructive work himself. There were other helpers on the job, men of thirty-five or forty years old. There was also an apprentice, called in the plumber's trade an "improver." Even he was not learning thoroughly, for the boss took no interest in him. He was hiring men for what they already knew,

not to teach them. The journeymen were willing enough to teach him, but they had little time or opportunity.

After a while the situation began to dawn on Connelly. He saw that, although the "improver" would in time become a plumber, good or bad, he himself had small chance of becoming a skilled workman. The boy found out, by this sad experience, that we make but little provision for training the workmen of the next generation.

In many parts of the United States we are waking up, almost suddenly, to this fact, that skilled workmen are scarce in all the trades, and that we have ridiculously inadequate machinery for training them. The old apprentice system

is practically dead; the public schools do not yet teach trades or even give training that leads toward the trades; and we are dependent for a supply of skilled men on the mere remnants of the old apprentice system and on the few private trade schools that exist and on the immigration of men who were trained before they came here.

Let us follow John Connelly further. As a last resort he went to a free evening trade school in New York. He had little faith in it because education and work were antagonistic ideas in his mind. But the trade school surprised him. The instructor told him to come in his working clothes and he was set to work at real plumbing. There was no play about it; it had to be done and done well. It turned out that the instructor was himself a journeyman plumber who worked six days a week at his trade and taught at night. Connelly now received the attention that the "improver" was supposed to get but did not. Before he finished the course, he had done all kinds of plumbing; and, as he worked, he was taught the theory of the trade also. One night a week he did mechanical drawing so that he could make plumber's plans and work by them. Toward the end of his course in the trade school, he gave up his job as helper and found work as an "improver." Since he understood what he was doing much better than the "improvers" who had received only haphazard instruction in the trade, he was soon able to pass the union examination, and he received his journeyman's card. This was six years ago. The helper who is working for him now is in the evening classes at that school. Connelly continues to take an interest in it, goes there one evening a week, and has sent there another boy besides his own helper.

Now, if there were trade schools-even evening trade schools-within easy reach of all the boys who wish to learn trades, John Connelly would not have wasted his time. We have only enough to serve as good examples to show the need of such schools and how they ought to be conducted. But we seem to be on the eve of a general awakening, and the nature of these schools is therefore interesting.

There are practically free evening trade schools in New York, Springfield, Mass., Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Indianapolis; and the Young Men's Christian Association has classes in many cities. There is an evening trade school in the Manual Training High School in Brooklyn. It not only trains

young men, but it helps older men to get out of the ruts in which they have been left. There was a machinist's helper there who had run a lathe for fifteen years and run it so well that his employers had decided to keep him at it. But he decided to learn enough about the rest of his trade to get a better job. These schools all have waiting lists. The capacity of the school opened in Philadelphia this year is 501 pupils. On December 8th, there were more than 300 applicants who could not be accommodated.

Day classes in the New York Trade School began twenty-six years ago. They last only four months, and are meant for boys sixteen or seventeen years old, who have stopped school and intend to enter a trade. These boys are taught in the same practical way the night students are taught, but instead of working two hours in the evening they work seven or eight hours a day. They are given the necessary mathematics, mechanical drawing, and the theory and some practice of a trade. The boy who takes this course loses but little of his wage-earning period, gets a better start than he would otherwise have, and lays a good foundation for becoming a skilled mechanic.

What this is worth in dollars and cents is shown by the statistics of the Baron de Hirsch School. Its pupils are mostly Russian Jews, at least sixteen years old, many of whom cannot read or write English. The school keeps them five and a half months. In that time it teaches them the rudiments of a trade, enough English to get along with, the mathematics and drawing necessary for this work, and some knowledge of the common forms of business, for most of them do not know how to make out a bill or to draw a cheque. Of the 221 graduates of the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st classes reporting on October 1st, 1905, 190 had worked before entering the school at an average weekly wage of $5.39. of $5.39. The average of the 221 immediately after the five and a half months' training was $7.50. After two years the wages increased about 100 per cent., some graduates receiving as much as $24.75 a week, full journeymen's pay. It costs the school about $132.00 to train each boy. The immediate increase in his yearly earning power is almost equal to the $132.00, and that is the least important result. The important fact is that the boy has started to become a skilled mechanic, an economically profitable and desirable citizen. This is the quickest and cheapest and most effective known process of transforming a Russian Jew, who

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THE VALUE OF TRAINING, EXPRESSED IN DOLLARS AND CENTS The relative efficiency of boys trained in the Williamson School and those trained by the apprentice system. (The figures on the heavy diagonal lines show the average weekly wage)

might else start life as a collar-button vender or a sweatshop worker, into a skilled American workman.

When the boys leave these schools they are not supposed to be journeymen mechanics. They are too young to command men's wages and they lack experience. It is the purpose of both schools that the graduates shall begin as apprentices, but with their training it is expected that by the time they are grown they will be journeymen. The Baron de Hirsch records show that they are skilful and well trained.

THE WILLIAMSON SCHOOL

There is in this country still another type of trade school. Isaiah V. Williamson, a Philadelphia merchant, left about $1,500,000 as a

foundation for The Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades. The school owns its own land, dormitories, workshops, and class rooms. The pupils are American-born boys, between sixteen and twenty-one years of age, from Philadelphia or the near-by counties. The course is three years. The school teaches each boy English, as in a high school, mathematics, mechanical drawing as applied to his trade, and any one of five trades. The two lower classes have four hours a day of shopwork and four hours of class-room work. The senior class devotes almost all of its time to shop-work. The teachers are men who have had practical experience in the work they teach. In the three-year course, the boys not only get the theory of their trade thor

oughly, but they get enough practice to become journeymen almost immediately after graduation. In carpentry, for example, there are fifty-six exercises, such as making joints, before they begin actually to build anything, yet before they finish they have constructed everything from a window-sash to a house. None of the work is done in miniature. It is all done of the sizes and the materials used in real construction and from drawings such as they will handle in the trade itself. It costs the school $1,500 to take an utterly unskilled boy, feed him, clothe him (down to his shoe-laces and collarbuttons), teach him a trade, and turn him out a skilled mechanic.

These boys are so well trained that they have for the most part risen to higher positions. For example, one of the graduates of the class of 1898 went into the Pennsylvania shops at Altoona as a machinist. He was soon made an assistant foreman of a gang which cleaned locomotives. Then he was made foreman of the gang. Soon after he was sent to Verona, Pa., as foreman of the shop, at $110 a month. He "made good" and was promoted to an assistant master mechanicship. He is now master mechanic of the Cumberland Valley Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He has been out of the Williamson School nine years, and he is not more than thirty years old. Mr. James M. Dodge, when president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, prepared a chart of the relative efficiency of boys in his employ trained at the Williamson School and those trained by the apprenticeship

system in his shops. It shows that Mr. Williamson's $1,500 per boy is one of the best investments ever made in this country.

TRADE SCHOOLS FOR GIRLS

It is probable that money spent in giving a boy a trade education is the more profitable in dollars and cents but, socially and morally, money spent in training girls is more important. A man of nineteen or twenty in this country can keep himself clothed and fed at unskilled labor; in many cases an unskilled woman cannot. The price of even skilled women's labor is low because those who partially support themselves can afford to work for less than self-supporting wages.

From girls who have to work under these adverse conditions, the Manhattan Trade School in New York draws its pupils. They cannot afford the time for a long training. Everything taught helps the girl to make a living. The school does not pretend to give its pupils an all-round education. It tries to save them from underpaid and morally dangerous unskilled work. A glance at the records of ten graduates taken at random will show that it is successful. The records are shown below.

This difference in earning power in the unskilled and the skilled is the difference between a starvation and a living wage, sometimes the difference between decency and crime.

There is another trade school for girls in New York, of particular interest because it is a part of the public school system. It teaches girls to earn their own living but

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