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Updated: May 19, 2025
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.
At times, hand-craft becomes rede-craft, for when the eye is blind the hand takes its place, and the finger learns to read, running over the printed page to find out what is written, as quickly as the eye. In these days, there are too many who look down on hand-craft. They think only of the tasks of a drudge or a char-boy.
You may almost take the measure of a man's brain, if you can find out what he sees with his eyes and what he does with hands; you may judge of a country, or of a city, if you know what it makes. I do not know that we need ask which is best, hand-craft or rede-craft. Certainly "the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee."
"The song whose thunderous chime Eternal echoes render The mournful Tuscan's haunted rhyme, And Milton's starry splendor!" I do not pit rede-craft against hand-craft. They are brothers, partners, consorts, who can work together, as right hand and left hand, as science and art, as theory and practice.
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.
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.
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.
Rede-craft may call for books and hand-craft for tools, but it is by the help of both books and tools that mankind moves on. Indeed, we shall not err wide of the mark if we say that a book is a tool, for it is the instrument which we make use of in certain cases when we wish to find out what other men have thought and done. Perhaps you will not be as ready to admit that a tool is a book.
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.
An aid to hand-craft is rede-craft the power to read, to reason, and to think; or, as it is said in the book of Common Prayer, "to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest."
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