liberties, encourages cheerfulness and tries to promote kind
thoughts, simply because it has been found that these things are
transmuted into good, and come out again at the finger-tips of the
workers in beautiful results. So we have pictures, statuary, flowers,
ferns, palms, birds, and a piano in every room. We have the best sanitary
appliances that money can buy; we have bathrooms, shower-baths, library,
rest-rooms. Every week we have concerts, dances, lectures.

Besides being a workshop, the Roycroft is a School. We are following out
a dozen distinct lines of study, and every worker in the place is
enrolled as a member of one or more classes. There are no fees to pupils,
but each pupil purchases his own books--the care of his books and
belongings being considered a part of one's education. All the teachers
are workers in the Shop, and are volunteers, teaching without pay, beyond
what each receives for his regular labor.

The idea of teaching we have found is a great benefit--to the teacher.
The teacher gets most out of the lessons. Once a week there is a faculty
meeting, when each teacher gives in a verbal report of his stewardship.
It is responsibility that develops one, and to know that your pupils
expect you to know is a great incentive to study. Then teaching demands
that you shall give--give yourself--and he who gives most receives most.
We deepen our impressions by recounting them, and he who teaches others
teaches himself. I am never quite so proud as when some one addresses me
as "teacher." We try to find out what each person can do best, what he
wants to do, and then we encourage him to put his best into it--also to
do something else besides his specialty, finding rest in change.

The thing that pays should be the expedient thing, and the expedient
thing should be the proper and right thing. That which began with us as a
matter of expediency is often referred to as a "philanthropy." I do not
like the word, and wish to state here that the Roycroft is in no sense a
charity--I do not believe in giving any man something for nothing. You
give a man a dollar and the man will think less of you because he thinks
less of himself; but if you give him a chance to earn a dollar, he will
think more of himself and more of you. The only way to help people is to
give them a chance to help themselves. So the Roycroft Idea is one of
reciprocity--you help me and I'll help you. We will not be here forever,
anyway; soon Death,