CHAPTER XLV. THE DREAM COMES TRUE

What kind of school is Mooseheart? That can not be answered by making

comparisons, for it is the only school of its kind. When the Moose

committee met to decide what sort of school it would build, somebody

suggested a normal school, a school to teach the young how to become

teachers.

I objected. “The world is well supplied with teachers,” I said.

“Everybody wants to teach the other fellow what to do, but nobody cares

to do it. Hand work will make a country rich and mouth work make it

poor. All the speeches I have ever made have never added a dollar to the

taxable value of America. But the tin and iron I wrought with my hands

have helped make America the richest country in the world. The Indians

were philosophers and orators; they could outtalk the white man every

time. But the Indians had no houses and no clothes. They wouldn't work

with their hands. A race that works with its hands has run the Indian

off the earth. If we quit working now and try to live on philosophy,

some race that still knows how to work will run us out of this country.

The first law of civilized life is labor. Labor is the giver of all good

things. Let us teach these orphans how to apply their labor, and after

that all things will be added unto them.”

And so we established a pre-vocational school where the young people

are taught farming, carpentry, cement construction, blacksmithing, gas

engine building and dozens of other fundamental trades that nourish our

industrial life, a life that draws no nutriment from Greek or Latin. I

am not opposed to literature and the classics. I make no war on the dead

languages. The war that killed them did the business. Why should I come

along and cut off their feet, when some one else has been there and cut

off their heads? But as an educator I promote the industrial trades,

because they educated and promoted me. I have done well in life, and if

you ask me how I did it, I'm telling you. Industry first and literature

afterward. And if you wish to see that kind of school in action, you can

see it at Mooseheart, Illinois.

There is a school with more than a thousand students, boys and girls

of various ages, ranging from one month to eighteen years. Some of

the students were born there, the mother having been admitted with

her youngsters soon after the loss of the father. Each lad will get an

introduction to a dozen trades, and when he selects the one that fits

him best, he will specialize in that and graduate at eighteen, prepared

for life. This education is the gift of more than half a million foster

fathers. The Moose are mostly working men, and so they equip their wards

for industrial life, and then place them on the job.

A boy that knows how to build concrete houses will not have to sleep

in haystacks. If every high-school boy in America was a carpenter and

cement builder how long would the housing shortage last? “The birds of

the air have their nests,” says the Bible. And we know why they have

them. Every bird knows how to build its nest. Nature teaches them their

trade. But men must learn their trades in school. I visited a college

once and saw how Greek was taught. They showed me a clay model of

ancient Athens and pointed out the house that each philosopher and poet

lived in thousands of years ago. “Where are the houses,” I asked the

graduates, “that you are going to live in to-morrow?” “Heaven only

knows,” they said. “We'll have to take our chances in the general

scarcity; our fate is on the knees of the gods.” The luck of the

Mooseheart boy is not on the knees of the gods; it is in his own hands.

I visited the Latin department and heard of Rome's ancient grandeur.

“The Romans,” they told me, “were not philosophers, but builders.

They built concrete roads to the ends of the earth. But their soldiers

brought back malarial fever from Africa. It destroyed the builders

and their secret perished with them. Eighty years ago concrete was

rediscovered.” I asked the students: “Do you know how to make concrete?”

“I'll say we don't,” they answered. And that's how much good their Latin

education had done them.

The Mooseheart boys know how to make those concrete roads and how

to build the motor-trucks that travel on them. “Transportation is

civilization.” We teach civilization at the Mooseheart school. We

teach art, too. But what is art without civilization? The cave men were

artists and drew pictures on their walls. But you can't eat pictures.

There is a picture on every loaf of bread. You always slice the colored

label off the loaf and eat the bread and throw the art away. The

Russians quit work a few seasons ago, and now they are selling their art

treasures cheap to the roughneck nations that stuck to the pick-ax and

the plow. The moral is: Keep working and you'll get the chromo. This

truth was taught at Mooseheart long before the Russians saw the point

and awarded us their picture gallery.

What I want to emphasize is that we are not opposed to art and

literature. All men want them; need them. We teach how to get them.