• Author: Unknown
• Editor: B-7413
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume V
• Page Number:
• Date: 3 13 1918
• Tags:
• advice

SLIPSHOD WORK DEGRADING

There can be but little doubt that many a man owes hls downfall to a slipshod way of doing his work and thereby losing interest, the great essential in any line of employment, if a man expects to do anything really worth while.

“We are, none of us,” says Ruskin, ‘‘so good architects as to be able to work habitually beneath our strength; and yet there is not a building that I know of, lately raised, wherein it is not sufficiently evident that neither architect nor builder has done his best. It is the especial characteristic of modern work. All old work nearly has been hard work. It may be the hard work of children, of barbarians, of rustics; but it is always their utmost.”

Such being the case let us have an end of this kind of work at once; cast off every temptation to it; do not let us degrade ourselves voluntarily, and then mutter and mourn over our shortcomings; let us confess our poverty or our parsimony, but not belie our human intellect. It is not a question of doing more, but of doing better. Do not let us boss our roofs with wretched, half-worked, blunt-edged rosette; do not let us flank our gates with rigid imitations of medieval statuary. Such things are mere insults to common sense, and only unfit us for feeling the nobility of their phototypes.