There was a satisfaction for the workman in making all these beauteous things. He knew, as a rule, for whom they were to be made. He knew where they were to be placed. He often saw his handiwork afterwards. His reputation depended on it. There was a happiness then in doing it well, and in taking his time to it, that surpasses {174} any idle pleasure away from his work, as happiness always surpasses pleasure. There was the joy of the doing, and joys we are coming to appreciate mean ever so much more than pleasures. What we want at the present time are more joys and less pleasures. How many men and women were blessed in that time because they had found their work. That is the only real happiness in life. How profusely it was scattered over the mediaeval world. Almost nothing that was made was of a character that could be done by mere routine. A man had to occupy both mind and body in the making of the textiles, of the kitchen utensils, of the furniture, of the various metal utensils required for houses, and so for nearly everything else. It is the workman who has mere routine work that has opportunity to think about other things and brood over his lot and grow more and more dissatisfied. It is the man who does not have to give his mind to what he is doing, but who while his body grows more and more tired accomplishing a limited set of constantly repeated movements, may allow his mind to ponder gloomily over his condition, compare it with that of others and grow envious, who has the worst possible seeds of discontent in his occupation. Men who did this sort of work that required active mental attention, learned to think for themselves. When they had moments of leisure, not having newspapers and superficial shallow books {175} to waste their time on, they did some thinking. Any one who has had a little intimate contact with the old-fashioned artisans, the shoemakers, the harnessmakers, the cabinetmakers who work at benches, the woodcarvers, men who have real trades, knows how often one finds among them a deep, serious thinker with regard to the problems of life around. They do not drink in other people's opinions and then think that they are thinking, because they are able to repeat some formulas of words. Such men are not easily led. They make good jurymen, they have logic; above all, they are thoughtful. There must have been much of this in the old time among the handicraftsmen of the Middle Ages. It is doubtless to this that we owe the fact that these men were gradually organized in many wonderful ways into the basic democracy on which the liberties of the English-speaking people of the world are founded. We shall have much more to say of this in treating of the wonderful fraternal organizations, with solutions for nearly every problem of social need, which these men succeeded in working out for themselves in times considered to have been benighted.