Learning a Trade | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 22, 1872

Learning a Trade.

THERE is a good story told of Stephen Girard, the millionaire, who sent his best clerk to learn the cooper's trade; and when he had mastered it, desired him to make him twenty, good, substantial barrels, for which, on delivery, he paid him a thousand dollars each, telling him he could then go into business, but if he was ever unfortunate, and lost his property, he could fall back on his cooper's trade, and be sure of earning a living.

The ancient Israelites made it a principle to give their children a trade, whatever their profession or education might be. So Paul, though brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, could also make a tent as well as the best of them.

Every man should master some business, whether mental, mechanical, mercantile, or agricultural. He should know something, and know how to do it. A skillful man is an independent man. He may go where he will, his craft will bring him support. His fortune is in his own hands. When he enters a city, he knows just what he can do, and he knows just where to go to find the work with which he is acquainted; and if he can do several things, his chances are so much the better. On the other hand, a man destitute of skill, and unacquainted with any special business, must drift about, and take his chance, and submit to the roughest and most menial employments, and those which bring the poorest pay. There is a great repugnance in the minds of many to learning a trade. An advertisement for a clerk, or office-boy, in one of our cities, brought something like a hundred applicants within twenty-four hours; while a blacksmith, advertising for an apprentice, had only one, and he was too old to undertake to learn the trade. And yet, the blacksmith's chances for success, and wealth, and prosperity, and honorable competence, and independence, were tenfold more promising than was the chance which was so eagerly sought. The supply

of clerks, and book-keepers, and soft-handed, genteel do-nothings, is very far in advance of the demand.

The need of the world is labor and brains;—willing hands, well skilled for work. And the father who neglects to provide his son with some useful occupation, and to see that he masters it thoroughly, wrongs his child, and runs the grievous risk of increasing the stock of idle, dependent and vicious members of society.

It is stated that in a report of the Prison Association, of fourteen thousand five hundred and ninety-six persons confined in the penitentiaries of thirty-six States, in 1867, seventy-seven per cent, or eleven thousand, two hundred and thirty-eight of the number, had never learned a trade. Another later report gives us over ninety per cent without trades, among the inmates of the penitentiaries.

A bright and intelligent boy was arraigned in Bangor, for stealing, and also for setting fire to a building. He was found guilty, and made an eloquent appeal to the judge to mitigate his sentence, for his poor mother's sake, and in consideration of the fact that he had been led on to crime by association with others more vicious than himself. Judge Kent gave him five years in State Prison, saying, “I think it will be a good thing for you. You can learn a good trade, and when you come out, you can be a good, respectable man.”

Many a poor fellow has had his first opportunity of learning a good trade in State Prison. But how much better it would have been, had he learned it before he went there, and thus kept out of mischief and bad company, and saved himself the sin of crime, and the shame of imprisonment. The voice of inspiration agrees in this matter with the teachings of common sense; says Paul, “Let ours also learn to profess honest trades [margin] for necessary uses, that they be not unfruitful.” Titus 3: 14.