The producer of old had pleasures of which the producer of the present knows not. He had the quiet and safety and healthfulness of a small shop. He had common interest with fellow-workers and apprentices in village politics or in church affairs. Best of all, perhaps, there was a personal quality in his work, because it was done for friends or for acquaintances, and an ever present sense of its importance, because it met needs which he had seen and recognized and which his own manner of life, similar to that of the consumer and on the same social plane, prepared him to understand. He had, for example, possibly known for months that his neighbor was saving money with which to hire him to make the chest of drawers upon which he was working, and there was a zest and a delight in his labor because he knew just how much she needed the piece of furniture, just where it was to stand, and just what purpose it was to serve. The favorable conditions of the work, the pleasant surroundings, the personal quality of labor, the feeling of its direct usefulness, were intensified in case of the housewife who worked in her own house with and for those she loved. Now conditions are different. The factory hand spends his working day in a great, dingy shop, with the maddening din of machinery in his ears. His associates are strangers, with whom he has little or nothing in common besides his work. He labors for an indefinite, far-away consumer whose manner of life is unknown to him. He has with this consumer neither the fellow-feeling which comes from sharing life in the same community, nor its only substitute, the ability which comes from broad education and from travel to project one’s self in imagination across space and to put one’s self in the place of a stranger and to realize his needs. The industrial changes which have taken from the producer a large part of his pleasure in work have not, of course, been without their compensating advantages. Of these the chief, perhaps, has come to the housewife, and consists in the opportunity to buy, ready made and at low cost, most of the articles which it used to be necessary for her to make at home. This advantage, with its corollary, increased leisure, comes to her, however, in her capacity as consumer and not in that of producer. When we consider the amount of pleasure which it is possible to derive from one’s own useful, well-directed labor, compared with that which comes from buying and using the results of other people’s work, we know that the permanent substitution of the consumer’s advantage for the producer’s joy in labor cannot be a part of progress. If the world is to move forward, the consumer’s leisure, which is the chief advantage of the present system of production, must be made the means of restoring the maker’s pleasure in his work.