It is without doubt a moment! In my boyhood I knew an old woodworker who on Sundays went to walk alone in a forest. Once I was lying on my back by a clump of bushes and saw his actions when he thought there was no one about. What has mankind, in America, not missed because men do not know, or are forgetting, what the old workman knew? There was Sandro Botticelli who knew. He was in danger once of becoming married to a woman but at the critical moment he fled. All night he ran in the streets of Florence wrestling with himself and in the end won the victory. The woman was not to come between him and his surfaces, those cathedral walls, those dumb strips of canvas on which he was to paint--not all his dreams--what he could of his dreams. Nothing was to come between him and his materials. The old woodworker in the forest approached a living tree and then walked away. He went close again and let his eye travel up along the tree’s trunk. Then, hesitatingly, lovingly he touched the tree with his fingers. That was all. It was enough. It was the workman en rapport with his materials. Oh, there is a feeling in the breasts of men that will not die. Ages come and go, but always the feeling is alive, haltingly, in the breasts of the few. To the workman his materials are as the face of his God seen over the rim of the world. His materials are the promise of the coming of God to the workman. Ford factories cannot kill the love of materials in the workmen and always and in the end the love of materials and tools in the workmen will kill the Fords. Standardization is a phase. It will pass. The tools and materials of the workmen cannot always remain cheap and foul. Some day the workmen will come back to their materials, out of the sterile land of standardization. If the machine is to survive it will come again under the dominance of the hands of workmen, as it already no doubt is doing, in a hundred, perhaps a thousand unknown places. The day of re-discovery of man by man may not be so far off as we fancy. Has there not been, in our own time, a slackening of the impulse toward purely material ends? Has not the cry for success and material growth become already a bore to the average American? These the thoughts of a man. To the boy lying in the silent place on the Sunday afternoon long ago and seeing the old workman touching so tenderly the tree that he dreamed might some day become the materials of his craft no such thoughts.