never imagine there is
reason to be proud of anything that may be accomplished by patience and
sandpaper.

Sec. XX. I shall only give one example, which however will show the reader
what I mean, from the manufacture already alluded to, that of glass. Our
modern glass is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form,
accurate in its cutting. We are proud of this. We ought to be ashamed of
it. The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and
clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was justly proud of it.
For there is this difference between the English and Venetian workman,
that the former thinks only of accurately matching his patterns, and
getting his curves perfectly true and his edges perfectly sharp, and
becomes a mere machine for rounding curves and sharpening edges, while
the old Venetian cared not a whit whether his edges were sharp or not,
but he invented a new design for every glass that he made, and never
moulded a handle or a lip without a new fancy in it. And therefore,
though some Venetian glass is ugly and clumsy enough, when made by
clumsy and uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely in its
forms that no price is too great for it; and we never see the same form
in it twice. Now you cannot have the finish and the varied form too. If
the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking of his
design; if of his design, he cannot think of his edges. Choose whether
you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at
the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone.

Sec. XXI. Nay, but the reader interrupts me,--"If the workman can design
beautifully, I would not have him kept at the furnace. Let him be taken
away and made a gentleman, and have a studio, and design his glass
there, and I will have it blown and cut for him by common workmen, and
so I will have my design and my finish too."

All ideas of this kind are founded upon two mistaken suppositions: the
first, that one man's thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by
another man's hands; the second, that manual labor is a degradation,
when it is governed by intellect.

On a large scale, and in work determinable by line and rule, it is
indeed both possible and necessary that the thoughts of one man should
be carried out by the labor of others; in this sense I have already
defined the best architecture to be the expression of the mind of
manhood by the hands o