Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

“ Conceive what it would mean to a man to make one stride from candles to electricity. Think of the laborious process of candle-making, the careful saving of wax and tallow and bayberries, the melting and dipping which was a large part of the year's work for housewives. Think even of the difference in obtaining light at all, the running to secure some coals from a neighbour's hearth-fire, the nerve-wearing work of striking light with flint and steel. ”

“ The worker takes with him the consciousness of his task well done, however humble the task may be, whither he goeth, and has his reward.
The articles which made up the home-made village—the few houses which fire and vandals have not destroyed, the faithfully wrought furniture with which the rooms were fitted, the linen, the coverlids, the fine needlework—remain, and may seem to us to have outlived their makers; but the honest workers have survived, and will survive, their work, which is in itself the proof of it. ”

“ To be sure, it may not be immortality of the highest order, but the immortality of all good work is essential in nature, whether the work be a chair or a great poem.
Probably Milton, to save his life, could not have made a chair, but another man could and did make the chair in which the reader of Milton sits. It is small immortality, but everything is of its kind.
When one sees the hand-made implements of labour, clumsy as they may be, they are not yet in need of repair, and one feels a certain respect for them, the well-wrought tools with which the work was done, as well as for the work. ”

“ Nobody but will concede that the lights are better, nobody but will concede that the facilities for transit are better, for communications between various quarters of the globe; but when we consider the products of the factories, and those which were patiently and slowly wrought with toil-roughened fingers, with an alert brain as supervisor, one wonders if there is really an advance.
In the hand-made village it is true that the people froze in winter in their badly heated houses, they suffered in summer in their screenless and blindless rooms, they had less comfort ”

“ But in those days all light, save that of the sun and moon and stars, was in its truest sense hand made. Of course even to-day all artificial light, so-called, depends upon human labour, but not, as in former days, upon individual human labour. How many of us have had actually to employ manual labour to secure light during dark hours for work or amusement?
We work, it is true, but in a sense our feet and hands, our factors of work, have become multiplied, and the end is not yet. We accomplish in a single day more than some of our forebears by unremitting industry could accomplish in a year ”

“ IN these days of machines and machine-work, when even the elements are harnessed down and made to bear the brunt of the labour of the world, when even horseflesh is gradually becoming valueless, when cogs and wheels, and gasoline, and steam, and electricity carry us, push us, clothe us, and feed us, we have little realisation of what a hand-made village ever meant. ”

“ When one looks at the solid old chairs, some of a period which antedated the rush-bottom, and sees them as sturdy as if they had not afforded rest for a generation, and more than a generation, one admires and feels a certain respect for the maker, although his name be all unknown to fame. ”

“ It is improbable that the work of a man who uses a machine in a modern furniture factory will endure in its first strength a century after he has passed away. His work will follow closely upon his heels. ”

“ It is really something to construct anything which will survive one for a hundred years, and lose nothing of its beauty and utility, even if it be nothing more than a table. One table made with painstaking care to endure is so much better than nothing at all. ”

“ If a man who flourished a century ago could come to life again upon a macadamised road, and see automobiles and trolley-cars flying past him, he would very likely think himself on another planet. Possibly the great Cotton Mather, could he be reincarnated in Boston town, the great Cotton with his belief in the supernatural and witchcraft, would even try his utmost to have all trolley-men and chauffeurs and their vehicles included in an auto da fé for the grace of God and the purging of the land from the practices of the devil. ”

“ The old tables are much more stable than the tables of to-day, although they have been weighted down with a hundred Thanksgiving dinners, and the great plates and platters of pewter, which also endure. ”