I have said, that the higher education we were promised has failed, for it has taken away from the great body of the people their only opportunity to express themselves. That is why I am hammering on the value of craftsmanship for the real leaders in fine arts. We have taken from the race that great body of workmen from whom artists should come, and in order to supply a place for the man of an artistic temperament we have built art schools--institutions which, so far as I have been able to find any record, had no existence at all in the time of Phidias or during the great period of the Renaissance. We are teaching art as a fine art--a subject that cannot ever be taught at all. He urged reforms in art education--reforms that have since come about. On this subject he wrote: The art schools of this country turn out young men and women by the thousands every year, and mostly they aren’t worth fifty cents a day to any artist or sculptor. It is a very sad fact. The economic independence of every human being who feels that he or she wants to study art is something that we should not lose a moment to assure. I think the sweetness of life is not so much affected by any other dozen causes as by the present inability of the race to express its emotions in a creative way. If sociologists and humanitarians could help this great body of youths to put their little heartaches into some beautiful, individual expression by creating some article in daily use, this pent-up tension, everywhere at the breaking point, would be used up at its source, as are springs of living water. And their work, their contentment and their power would be felt in every home. The message seems important because so patently the truth. Gutzon Borglum was certainly a master craftsman, from the design of tools to the art that was his profession. It is significant that while he always preached a doctrine of change and modernity and was soundly berated by the academicians, he never produced anything cabalistic. Down deep in him was the understanding of what people were thinking about and what they could understand. They understood him best, perhaps, when he was denouncing something. He had a keen eye, a vibrant voice, and, undoubtedly, a fine vocabulary with which to do the denouncing. CHAPTER EIGHT _VARIETY OF LIFE IN A STUDIO_