Of course it is impossible to set any actual time limit to the work you are doing, but it would be a mighty good thing to inaugurate the next fiscal year by adopting the new policies and methods in the departmental business. I want to assure you of one thing, and that is that your mere appointment has already produced a very marked moral effect. The good results of seventy men studying local methods and local needs on the ground, in the departments, does not lie only in the knowledge gained; you render a great service by making the men with whom you come in contact feel that they actually share in this movement. The most magnificent architecture that our race has ever been able to produce—the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages—were made, not by any known architect, not even by any number of architects whose names have ever been recorded. We do not know the name of an architect or builder connected with those great masterpieces. Each was made by a number of men, architects and builders, each of whom felt amply rewarded by the mere fact that he was able to put all the best that there was in him into his work. He did not care to have his name known, he did not desire to be immortalized in connection with the work; he cared only to make the work itself the best that it could possibly be made. There never was an army that amounted to anything in campaign or in battle unless the average soldier had in him the spirit which made him regard the winning of the campaign, the winning of the battle, as in itself the end, and his service, if good enough, as in itself the reward. He might wish other rewards if they happened to come; but if they did not, well and good. The doing the duty is of itself a sufficient reward for any man. So it has to be if the work of the Government is to be really well done. As Ruskin has said, there are two ways of doing work; to work for the fee, for the payment, and to work for the work’s own sake. The work done simply to get money for having done it will never, under any circumstances, rank with the work done by the man whose sense of self-respect, whose capacity for loyalty to an ideal, makes him discontented unless the work that is at his hand is done with all the skill that heart and hand and brain can bring to it.