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From simple tools, turn to complex; to the printing press, the sewing machine, the locomotive, the telegraph, the ocean steamer; all are full of ideas. All are the offspring of hand-craft and rede craft, of skill and thought, of practice put on record, of science and art. Now, the welfare of each one of us, the welfare of our land, the welfare of our race, rests on this union.
I begin by saying "handy-craft," for that is the form of the word now in vogue, that which we are wonted to see in print and hear in speech; but I like rather the old form, "hand-craft," which was used by our sires so long ago as the Anglo-Saxon days. Both words mean the same thing, the power of the hand to seize, hold, shape, match, carve, paint, dig, bake, make, or weave.
The economy was built around wood cutting, charcoal burning, backward animal husbandry, hand-tool agriculture, hand-craft industry, the rudiments of commerce and finance centered in trading cities. The great houses of the aristocracy and the gentry, scattered villages, towns and walled cities were preoccupied and disrupted by endless feuding and between-seasons warfare.
We, especially, who are teachers and parents, should see to it that the young get "hand-craft" while they are getting "rede-craft." How can this be done? Mothers begin right in the nursery, teaching little fingers to play before the tongue can lisp a sentence. Alas! this natural training has often been stopped at school.
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.
Neither form is in fashion, as we know very well, for people choose nowadays such Latin words as "technical ability," "manual labor," "industrial pursuits," "dexterity," "professional artisanship," "manufacture," "decorative art," and "technological occupations," not one of which is half as good as the plain, old, strong term "hand-craft."
Punch always drew the Yankee with a blade in his fingers; but they found out long ago in Great Britain that whittling in this land led to something, a Boston notion, a wooden clock, a yacht America, a labor-saving machine, a cargo of wooden-ware, a shop full of knick-knacks, an age of inventions. Boys need not be kept back to the hand-craft of the knife.
Some men can only get on by force of arms, lifting, pounding, heaving, or by power of sitting at counter or a desk and "clerking it." Machinery works against hand-craft. In many branches of labor, the hand now has but little to do, and that little is always the same, so that labor becomes tiresome and the workman dull.
So too, in the lowest school, as far as possible from the university, the kindergarten has won its place and the blocks, and straws, and bands, the chalk, the clay, the scissors, are in use to make young fingers deft. Between the highest and the lowest schools there is a like call for hand-craft.
They show that rede-craft and hand-craft are alike held in honor, and that a liberal education means skill in getting and skill in using knowledge; that knowledge comes from searching books and searching nature; that the brain and the hand are in close league.
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