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;
they have the means to supply what they want. Is there the will? Know
they the way? Far and near the cry is heard for a different training
from that now given in the public schools.
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