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Updated: June 18, 2025
And he began to notice that these people, in spite of the crudities of their own life, enjoyed some of the advantages of a fairly complex civilization. Their implements were not hand-craft products, but showed machine workmanship. There were two objects hanging on hooks on the kitchen wall which he was sure were weapons.
Hitherto, until quite lately, in schools both low and high, rede-craft has had the place of honor, hand-craft has had no chance. But a change is coming. In the highest of all schools, universities, for example, work rooms, labor places, "laboratories," are now thought to be as useful as book rooms, reading rooms, libraries.
Ruskin, in a lecture on the relation of Art to Morals, calls attention to a note which Durer made on some drawings sent him by Raphael: "These figures Raphael drew and sent to Albert Durer in Nurnberg, to show him his hand, 'sein hand zu weisen." Ruskin compares this phrase with other contests of hand-craft, Apelles and Protogenes showing their skill by drawing a line; Giotto in striking a circle.
Nevertheless, he who lives by the machine alone lives but half a life; while he who uses his hand to contrive and to adorn drives dullness from his path. A true artist and a true artisan are one. Hand-craft, the power to shape, to curve, to beautify, to create, gives pleasure and dignity to labor. In other times and in other lands, hand-craft has had more honor than it has had with us.
Walking insures fresh air, but it does not train the body or mind like games and sports which are played out of doors. His boyish love of fishing gave him his manly skill in exploration. I speak as if hand-craft was to be learned by sport. So it may. It may also be learned by labor.
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.
If there be those in this hall who think that hand-craft is adverse to rede-craft, let me ask them to study the lives of men of mark.
So it comes to pass that young men grow up whose hands have not been trained to any kind of skill; they wish, therefore, to be buyers and sellers, traders, dealers, and so the market is overstocked with clerks, book-keepers, salesmen, and small shop-keepers, while it is understocked in all the higher walks of hand-craft.
Let me come nearer home, and as I take my seat let me name a son of this very town who loved hand-craft and rede-craft, and worthily aided both Isaiah Thomas, the patriot printer, editor, and publisher, historian of the printer's craft in this land, and founder of the far famed antiquarian library, eldest in that group of institutions which gave to Worcester its rank in the world of letters, as its many products give it standing in the world of industry and art.
Many men have made more noise in the world than Slater and Whitney; few if any can be named whose peaceable hand-craft has done so much to give this country its front place in the markets of the globe.
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