The man who designs and makes a good chair, or other useful article of any kind—all the more if it be beautiful as well as useful—is second only in the respectability of his occupation to him who brings grain and grass out of otherwise barren ground.
It is a very mistaken notion of the relations of things that sets trading—that is, buying and selling—a very different matter from commerce, which is the bringing of the products of one country into another—above handicraft. But handicraft seems to be falling into neglect.
The number of artisans who thoroughly understand their craft, and take a pride in doing good work, seems to be diminishing at a rate which is perceptible from one five years’ end to another. Indeed, it is notorious among all those who have occasion from time to time to employ skilled labour, that if they need the services of, let us say, a carpenter, a cabinet-maker, a watchmaker, or a painter, they cannot be sure, without some troublesome inquiry, that the work will be done in a workmanlike manner.
This uncertainty has no reference to that skill and taste which are the personal attributes of the individual workman, and give one man a reputation which another can never attain, but to that knowledge and skill, at once elementary and complete, which is possessed by every artisan who has “learned his trade.”
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