a beautiful poem that makes your heart throb with gladness
and gratitude, you are simply partaking of the emotion that the author
felt when he wrote it. To possess a piece of work that the workman made
in joyous animation is a source of joy to the possessor.

And this love of the work done by the marriage of hand and brain can
never quite go out of fashion--for we are men and women, and our hopes
and aims and final destiny are at last one. Where one enjoys, all enjoy;
where one suffers, all suffer.

Say what you will of the coldness and selfishness of men, at the last we
long for companionship and the fellowship of our kind. We are lost
children, and when alone and the darkness gathers, we long for the close
relationship of the brothers and sisters we knew in our childhood, and
cry for the gentle arms that once rocked us to sleep. Men are homesick
amid this sad, mad rush for wealth and place and power. The calm of the
country invites, and we would fain do with less things, and go back to
simplicity, and rest our tired heads in the lap of Mother Nature.

Life is expression. Life is a movement outward, an unfolding, a
development. To be tied down, pinned to a task that is repugnant, and to
have the shrill voice of Necessity whistling eternally in your ears, "Do
this or starve," is to starve; for it starves the heart, the soul, and
all the higher aspirations of your being pine away and die.

At the Roycroft Shop the workers are getting an education by doing
things. Work should be the spontaneous expression of a man's best
impulses. We grow only through exercise, and every faculty that is
exercised becomes strong, and those not used atrophy and die. Thus how
necessary it is that we should exercise our highest and best! To develop
the brain we have to exercise the body. Every muscle, every organ, has
its corresponding convolution in the brain. To develop the mind, we must
use the body. Manual training is essentially moral training; and physical
work is, at its best, mental, moral and spiritual--and these are truths
so great and yet so simple that until yesterday many wise men did not
recognize them.

At the Roycroft Shop we are reaching out for an all-round development
through work and right living.

And we have found it a good expedient--a wise business policy. Sweat-shop
methods can never succeed in producing beautiful things. And so the
management of the Roycroft Shop surrounds the workers with beauty, allows
many