No experience can advance the cause of the handicrafts more than the cultivation of the habit of seeing beauty all along the way of life. An increasing number of our people are cultivating that habit and are practicing in their homes the sound and satisfying principle expressed by the great craftsman, teacher, and philosopher of art William Morris, who said “Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
It is the homemakers of America scattered throughout all the states, in cities towns, villages and open country who are, as has been said, the hope for the fireside industries of the Southern Highlanders, and, it may be added, for the handicrafts of all the rural areas of our country. These homes are more than temporary markets, more than recipients of whatever may be offered for sale to them; they are in a very real sense partners with the makers in conserving and developing the extraordinary range of handwork with which the United States is so richly endowed.
Allen H. Eaton, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937) p. 331-2
