Every man in the island
would have got into the habit of work at a period of life when it is
most necessary, and when too many young men have no serious occupation.
Parents should welcome the training and discipline for their children,
and certificates of character and intelligence given by the department
of national works should open up prospects of rapid employment in the
ordinary industrial life of the country when the period of public
service was closed. For those engaged there would be a true comradeship
in labor, and the phrase, "the dignity of labor," about which so much
cant has been written, would have a real significance where young men
were working together for the public benefit with the knowledge that any
completed work would add to the health, beauty, dignity, and prosperity
of the State. In return for this labor the State should feed and clothe
its industrial army, educate them, and familiarize them with some branch
of employment, and make them more competent after this period of service
was over to engage in private enterprise. Two years of such training
would dissipate all the slackness, lack of precision, and laziness which
are so often apparent in young men who have never had any strict
discipline in their homes, and whom parental weakness has rendered unfit
for the hard usiness of life.
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