That the workman is a better and truer man when he is given control of the tools and materials of his craft is being found out. There is a small public growing up that has discrimination enough to want good work. Honest books begin to sell a little. Honest painting that isn’t just pretty picture making begins to sell. Puritanism, as such, is pretty well licked. It cannot any longer so easily suppress books of artistic merit because some housewife is afraid the morals of her daughter, who has just come home from the movies or the Follies, will be ruined by being told how babies happen to be born. The force of the New England moralistic culture is spent. Today in America any man of talent who writes a book that is significant, a work of art, can get it published and there will be critics to acclaim him. The real pioneering for the better workmen has been done by men like Whitman and Dreiser for the writers, and others like Stieglitz, Marin and the critics Rosenfeld, Cheney and others for the painters. If you want to do good work and can pick up a living in some way there will be people to recognize what you are trying to do and perhaps no man has a right to ask more than that. There are ways to get moments of happiness out of life other than by making money and being successful and the men who grind out second-rate flashy stories for the magazines have their bad moments. They are not really happy men. It is no fun, believe me, to wake up in the middle of the night and to realize that you have sold out your own craft. For it is as true as there is a sun in the sky that men cannot live in the end without love of craft. It is to the man what love of children is to the woman. When you are considering what it is that makes the younger generation so restless, what makes the workers on your buildings and in your factories such indifferent workmen, what makes so much of contemporary art cheap and transitory, consider also what the industrial age has tended to do to this old love of craft so deeply rooted in men. It is a dangerous process. Soil the workman’s tools and materials long enough and he may turn and kill you. You are striking at the very root of the man’s being. However, I do not want to be sensational. In spite of the growth of standardization there are for me many hopeful signs. Men are becoming increasingly conscious of what is being done to them. The very man who lends his talents to cheapness is unconvinced. He will come to you in private with an apology. “I have to live,” he will say. “I have a wife and children. I am only doing cheap work for the time being. When I have made a little money I intend to do some honest, decent work.”