with volunteers. Our young men
are very greedy of honor, and do not let slip such opportunities. Of course you
will see that dependance on the purely voluntary choice of avocations involves
the abolition in all of anything like unhygienic conditions or special peril to
life and limb. Health and safety are conditions common to all industries. The
nation does not maim and slaughter its workmen by thousands, as did the private
capitalists and corporations of your day.«
    »When there are more who want to enter a particular trade than there is room
for, how do you decide between the applicants?« I inquired.
    »Preference is given to those who have acquired the most knowledge of the
trade they wish to follow. No man, however, who through successive years remains
persistent in his desire to show what he can do at any particular trade, is in
the end denied an opportunity. Meanwhile, if a man cannot at first win entrance
into the business he prefers, he has usually one or more alternative
preferences, pursuits for which he has some degree of aptitude, although not the
highest. Every one, indeed, is expected to study his aptitudes so as to have not
only a first choice as to occupation, but a second or third, so that if, either
at the outset of his career or subsequently, owing to the progress of invention
or changes in demand, he is unable to follow his first vocation, he can still
find reasonably congenial employment. This principle of secondary choices as to
occupation is quite important in our system. I should add, in reference to the
counter-possibility of some sudden failure of volunteers in a particular trade,
or some sudden necessity of an increased force, that the administration, while
depending on the voluntary system for filling up the trades as a rule, holds
always in reserve the power to call for special volunteers, or draft any force
needed from any quarter. Generally, however, all needs of this sort can be met
by details from the class of unskilled or common laborers.«
    »How is this class of common laborers recruited?« I asked. »Surely nobody
voluntarily enters that.«
    »It is the grade to which all new recruits belong for the first three years
of their service. It is not till after this period, during which he is
assignable to any work at the discretion of his superiors, that the young man is
allowed to elect a special avocation. These three years of stringent discipline
none are exempt from, and very glad our young men are to pass from this severe
school into the comparative liberty of the trades.