A bricklayer has been there employed whose touch is like the stroke of
an artist. He handled each brick as if it were porcelain, balanced it
carefully in his hand, measured with his eye just the amount of mortar
which it needed, and dropped the block into its bed, without staining
its edge, without varying from the plumb line, by a stroke of hand-craft
as true as the sculptor's. Toil gave him skill.
The second point I make is this: If you really value hand-craft,
buy that which shows hand-craft, encourage those who are engaged in
hand-craft, help on with your voice and with your pocket, those who
bring taste and skill and art into the works of their hand. If your
means are so small that you only buy what you need for your daily wants,
you cannot have much choice, you must buy that which is cheapest; but
hardly any one within the sound of my voice is so restricted as that;
almost if not quite every one buys something every year for his
pleasure, a curtain, a rug, a wall paper, a chair, or a table not
certainly needed, a vase, a clock, a, mantel ornament, a piece of
jewelry, a portrait, an etching, a picture. Now whenever you make such a
purchase, to please your taste, to make your parlor or your chamber more
attractive, choose that which shows good handiwork. Such a choice will
last. You will not tire of it as you will of that which has but a
commonplace form or pattern.
I come now to a third point. That which has just been said applies
chiefly to things whose price is fixed by beauty. But handicraft gives
us many works not pleasing to the eye, yet of the highest skill--a
Jacquard loom, a Corliss engine, a Hoe printing press, a Winchester
rifle, an Edison dynamo, a Bell telephone. Ruskin may scout the work of
machinery, and up to a certain point may take us with him. Let us
allow that works of art marked by the artist's own touch--the gates of
Paradise by Ghiberti, a shield by Cellini, a statue by Michael Angelo,
are better than all reproductions and imitations, better than plaster
casts by Eichler, electrotypes by Barbedienne, or chromos by Prang. But
even Ruskin cannot suppress the fact that machinery brings to every
thrifty cottage in New England comforts and adornments which, in the
days of Queen Bess, were not known outside of the palace. Be mindful,
then, that handicraft makes machines which are wonders of productive
force--weaving tissues such as Penelope never saw, of woolen, cotton,
linen, and silk, to carpet our floors, cover our tables, cushion our
chairs, and clothe our bodies; machines of which Vulcan never dreamed,
to point a needle, bore a rifle, cut a watch wheel, or rule a series
of lines, measuring forty thousand to an inch, with sureness which the
unaided hand can never equal. Machinery is a triumph of handicraft as
truly as sculpture and architecture. The fingers which can plan and
build a steamship or a suspension bridge, which can make the Quinebaug
and the Blackstone turn spindles by the hundred thousand, which can turn
a rag heap into spotless paper, and make myriads of useful and artful
articles from rough metal, are fingers which this age alone has evolved.
The craft which makes useful things cheap can make cheap things
beautiful. The Japanese will teach us how to form and finish, if we do
not first teach them how to slight and sham.
A fourth point is this. If hand-craft is of such worth, boys and girls
must be trained in it. This, I am well aware is no new thought. Forty
years ago schools of applied science were added to Harvard and Yale
colleges; twenty years ago Congress gave enough land-scrip to aid in
founding at least one such school in every state; men of wealth, like
many whom you have known and whom you honor, have given large sums for
like ends. Now the people at large are waking up. They see their needs;