EMPLOYMENT  PSYCHOLOGY,  LABOR,  AND  INDUSTRY  385

for  the  recent  dearth  of  labor  is  that  labor  has  been  so
cheap  in  the  past  that  we  have  come  to  depend  on  it  as
wholly  as  the  South,  at  one  time,  depended  on  slavery.
Dirty  work  is  no  more  necessary  now  than  slavery  was  then.
To  make  dirty  work  less  dirty  requires  only  a  little  thought
and  ingenuity.  It  is  not  an  inescapable  evil.  The  same
may  be  said  about  arduous  physical  labor.  To  eliminate
or  ameliorate  the  objectionable  conditions,  when  in  the
course  of  progress  they  become  objectionable,  is  only
another  little  problem  for  man’s  inventive  and  mechanical ­
  ingenuity  to  meet.  And,  queerly  enough,  education,
at  the  same  time  at  which  it  develops  men  and  women
who  find  dirty  and  monotonous  work  objectionable,  also
develops  the  skill  and  knowledge  by  which  these  objectionable ­
  features  can  be  removed.  So  far  as  industry
goes,  there  can  never  be  a  superabundance  of  educated
people,  even  though  managers  are  sometimes  put  to  it  to
make  use  of  intelligent  workers  in  an  intelligent  way.
The  other  contention,  that  education  will  make  workers
dissatisfied  with  the  highly  specialized  and  monotonous
types  of  work  brought  about  by  the  invention  of  machinery ­
  and  thereby  retard  industrial  progress,  may  be  answered ­
  in  much  the  same  way.  Education  can  never  hope
to  solve  the  problem  of  labor  turnover  by  attempting  to
create  artisans  and  craftsmen  of  the  old  type.  This  is
one  of  the  pretty  dreams  of  retrospective  Utopians,  and
runs  counter  to  the  entire  trend  of  productive  civilization.
Not  by  the  abolition  of  machinery  but  by  a  further  and
an  even  undreamed-of  development  of  mechanical  devices
will  education  help  solve  the  problem  of  labor  turnover.
Machines  must  more  and  more  be  made  to  do  the  work
for  which  labor  is  becoming  scarce  or  which  labor  is  unwilling ­
  to  do.  But  instead  of  workers  being  mated  to  a