“In my own school-life--as a day scholar--I had two such friendships, though of course in a day school there was not the same possibility of their development. One was with an elder boy some five years my senior, and the other with a master some twelve years older than myself. I was a shy, timid youngster, and not having a robust physique did not enter much into the ordinary athletics of the school. My elder friend was a very delicate, gentle, refined boy with a purity and loftiness of mind in striking contrast to the filthy moral atmosphere of the school at that time, but he was never censorious or self-righteous. I feel that this friendship was the most powerful influence in my early life in keeping a high ideal of conduct before me--much more powerful than the influence of home, which I do not think I was at all conscious of. “After he left school, for Cambridge, we used to write regularly to one another--long letters, hardly ever less than three sheets in length. I remember I used to think him the most handsome man I knew, but looking now at his photo, taken about that time and comparing it with others, I see that his features were inferior to many others of my school-fellows. At the end of his second year he died of consumption. It was during the Long Vacation, and I was abroad at the time. I remember I used to sit up late into the night writing very long letters to him about all I had seen, to interest him during his illness. I did not know how ill he really was, but I had a terrible fear that I should not see him again. When I got back and found he had just died the shock was awful. For weeks I felt as if I had not a friend in the whole world. I have never felt any loss so keenly either before or since.… “The other friendship with my mathematical master, though not so intimate, was still of a very affectionate character. I feel I owe a great deal to it--he laid the foundation of my ideal of a teacher’s duty to his pupils.”--_Private letter._ “It is not new in itself; this, the feeling that drew Jesus to John, or Shakespeare to the youth of the sonnets, or that inspired the friendships of Greece, has been with us before, and in the new citizenship we shall need it again. The Whitmanic love of comrades is its modern expression; Democracy--as socially, not politically conceived--its basis. The thought as to how much of the solidarity of labour and the modern Trade-Union movement may be due to an unconscious faith in this principle of comradeship, is no idle one. The freer, more direct, and more genuine relationship between men, which is implied by it, must be the ultimate basis of the reconstructed Workshop.”--C. R. ASHBEE, “Workshop Reconstruction and Citizenship,” p. 160.