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so HERE THEN ARE THE PREACH- 
 MENTS ENTITLED THE CITY OF 
 TAGASTE, AND A DREAM AND A 
 PROPHECY, BY FRA ELBERTUS \^ 
 
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of this edition there were printed and specially hand 
 illumined nine hundred and forty copies, and this 
 
 rt book, is Number i''B7' 
 
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THE CITY OF TAGASTE 
 
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 "T" A G A S T E, at one time, 
 was the very hub & center 
 of civilization. Books were so 
 common in Tagaste that the 
 municipality supplied them 
 gratis to all children, and 
 when you went to a drug store 
 and bought a tooth brush, 
 the proprietor presented you 
 a book. 
 
 Pliny, the elder, relates that 
 once in Tagaste, a book agent 
 called on a man and asked 
 him to subscribe, and the man 
 said, " I don't want your 
 book." 
 
 'W; 
 
The City And the agent said, " Buy it for your children." 
 of Tagaste And the man replied, "I have no children!" 
 "Then buy it for your wife." 
 
 " I have no wife — and look, here," said the man, " if 
 I bought your book, do you know what I would do 
 with it ? " 
 
 " No — what would you do with it r" " asked the 
 agent. 
 
 " I 'd throw it at the cat ! " 
 
 " Put your name right here ! " gleefully cried the 
 book agent. 
 
 And so books became so cheap that men utilized 
 them to throw at the cat. Instead of spelling it mis- 
 sal — they spelled it missile. 
 
 In Tagaste they used to cut down a tree, saw it into 
 blocks, feed them into a machine, make the sawdust 
 into a dried paste, and print a newspaper on it, all 
 in forty-six minutes by the watch. 
 The rage tor invention increased — typesetting ma- 
 chines came in, and typesetters by the thousand, too 
 old to learn a new trade, were taken from their cases, 
 and walked the streets looking for work, and not 
 finding it, prayed for death. 
 
 By the use of photography, the engraver was abol- 
 ished in many instances, & the illuminator had long 
 turned to dust. 
 Even the bookbinder got up one morning, and like 
 
 2 
 
Othello, found his occupation gone — paper made to The City 
 look like leather was pasted by machinery over of Tagaste 
 boards made from wood pulp. Other covers were fed 
 into a machine by a girl, who was paid two boboli 
 a day, and were stamped in gaudy red or blue. 
 The books were stitched on specially-made sewing 
 machines, and no sheets of paper were folded by 
 hand — all were fed into a machine. And so in a fac- 
 tory where ten thousand books a day were made, 
 there was neither a printer, an illustrator, an illumi- • 
 nator nor a binder. There were sad-eyed girls and 
 yellow, haggard boys who stood all day & fed sheets 
 into a machine, week after week, month after month, 
 twelve hours a day, and they were paid just enough 
 money to keep them from starvation. 
 And so to us who view the condition through the 
 dim lapse of time, it seems curious that there should 
 have existed such a mad rage to make books cheap. 
 Was the country so poor that buyers could not af- 
 ford to pay more than the price of a ham sandwich 
 for a volume ? 
 
 Not at all — this happened in the richest country in 
 the world, and in cities where there were hundreds 
 of homes that cost upwards of a hundred thousand 
 dinars each. But the rage for cheapness was in the 
 air — not how good can this be made, but how cheap, 
 was the motto. 
 
The City Society had gotten itselt separated into two distinct 
 of Tagaste classes — those who worked with their hands & those 
 who worked with their heads. And those who worked 
 with their heads thought it disgraceful {ov at least 
 very bad form") to work with their hands. Many of 
 those who used their heads flocked to the cities and 
 called the people who lived in the country, names 
 — such as Havseed, Rube and Buckwheat. 
 Those people who used their hands had no energy 
 left nor inclination to use their heads, after the day's 
 work was done; and they often grew dispirited, dis- 
 sipated and vicious; and those who used only their 
 heads suffered from Bright's Disease, Paresis & Nerv- 
 ous Prostration. Both classes ceased to live in the 
 open air. 
 
 But the wealth drifted into the possession of those 
 who used their heads. Thev lived in a sort of bar- 
 baric splendor like Turkish Pashas, and were much 
 given to buying things. Thev were unhappy & rest- 
 less, and alwavs in search of some new thrill which 
 might make them forget the misery of their condi- 
 tion. To kill time, the women did what thev called 
 "Shopping." That is, they passed through the streets 
 where the shop windows were temptingly filled with 
 things, and the rich women whose husbands worked 
 with their heads clawed over things & bought things 
 — they bought things to put in their mouths, to put 
 
 4 
 
on their heads, and on their backs. And then they T/ie City 
 ordered other things put into bundles and sent to of Tagaste 
 their homes. Of course they did not need all these 
 things, and the result was that their houses got so 
 full of things that many servants had to be employed 
 to take care of them. And these servants were more 
 of a care than the things. Then the owners still find- 
 ing themselves uneasy, restless and discontented — 
 not knowing what was the matter — concluded they 
 had not bought the right things. So they went out 
 and bought more things. And the husbands of these 
 women who bought the things schemed eternally 
 with their heads to get money to pay the servants 
 who looked after the things, and to buy more things; 
 and sometimes these men noticing that in the library 
 a shelf was not quite full, telephoned down to a 
 Dry Goods Store thus : " Send me up three dozen 
 books — all discounts off — rush ! " 
 These people who worked only with their heads often 
 drove horses with half a tail ; the women bought 
 birds to decorate their bonnets, and no one seemed 
 to know that a bird in the bush is worth two on a 
 woman's hat. And the men so conducted the civil 
 engineering of the cities, that the sewage and filth 
 of the factories were run into the rivers and the fish 
 all killed. To talk of bathing in a river was a big 
 joke to them. They also polluted the air so that a 
 
 5 
 
The City city could be located fifty miles away by the clouds 
 of Tagaste of soot that hovered over it; and so thick, was this 
 dust, dirt and poisonous vapor that no valuable work 
 of art could be safely kept in the municipalitv. Then 
 they sent out gangs of men to devastate the forests, 
 to get wood to make books and things. 
 At last in desperation, certain fanatics got laws passed 
 to preserve the forests, to protect the hsh in the 
 rivers, the birds in the air, and the horses' tails, and 
 to do away with the dust and dirt and vapor, so the 
 works of art would not be ruined and the peoples' 
 lives shortened or dimmed by the absence of sun- 
 shine. 
 
 But these laws were executed only every little while 
 — and not always then — for the lish in the river 
 were all dead — dead as Reconcentrados — and the 
 birds had mostly been caught, and the forests were 
 gone, and as for the gas and soot and smoke, why 
 the people were getting used to it — who cares ! 
 And all the while sad-eyed girls bent over machines, 
 and yellow, humpbacked bovs, Polynesians and Ab- 
 yssinians, fed book covers, made of paper to look 
 like leather, into hoppers, and the din of wheels and 
 pullevs and the jangle and roar of machinery nearly 
 drowned the voice of the Proprietor who only 
 worked with his head, as he called over the tele- 
 phone to his Foreman, '< Have those fiftv thousand 
 6 
 
books ready for Segull-Kuper Company, Saturday T/ie City 
 night 1 " of Tagaste 
 
 And in a hundred cities, five hundred publishers 
 printed on great rolls of the wood paper, records of 
 the murders, stealings, scandals and vile doings of the 
 day. These records were called newspapers and they 
 were in size and extent actual books, containing on 
 an average about forty thousand words each. And on 
 the Holy Day or Seventh Day, called by many the 
 Lord's Day, the paper was five times as large and ten 
 times as nasty — it was a tale of crime and grime and 
 blood and woe and death. And if the things did not 
 really happen, they were invented. 
 I have said these papers were equal in size to books, 
 and this was so, for a novel of one hundred thou- 
 sand words is a good-sized book. But in a city called 
 Gotham, there were newspapers printed on the 
 Lord's Day which contained over two hundred thou- 
 sand words. It was a giant volume and was given 
 away for a pittance, for the profit to the publisher 
 was in the advertisements of bargain-day things. Of 
 course it was not bound, for there was no time for 
 that, as the people wanted it hot and smoking from 
 the press, and then as it was thrown away after din- 
 ner, there was no need to preserve it. And so it could 
 not even be used to throw at the cat. These papers 
 were taken into most of the homes and were also 
 
The City read by children, young girls and women. And when 
 of Tagaste at long intervals some man spoke of the uselessness 
 of such records of ephemeral happenings, he was 
 regarded by his neighbors as a mild lunatic. But 
 no one knew the worthlessness and uselessness of 
 the papers better than the men themselves who 
 made them. And they only made them because they 
 had to get bread and butter whereby they might 
 exist; they never expressed themselves — they simply 
 expressed the things the Proprietor thought would 
 sell the paper. Possibly a few of these newspaper 
 workers were deluded bv the vain idea that the 
 facility in writing acquired in a newspaper office 
 would lead to literature. But once caught in the 
 mesh they seldom escaped until all the ambition and 
 life were squeezed out of them ; and when they were 
 thrust out into the streets they were like the type- 
 setters — too old to learn another trade, and without 
 the vim and buoyancy to succeed in something else. 
 ^ Into the maw of the newspapers and commercial 
 sweat-shops were fed the bright, ambitious country 
 boys, and heat, fever, unrest and broken hours did 
 their work. And the toilers came out crippled, poor 
 in purse, broken in health and spirit; or better, they 
 died and received, at last, the rest that lite denied. 
 ^ The city of Tagaste, centuries ago, turned to dust 
 and ruin. Over its walls now creep the ivv and cling- 
 
 8 
 
ing wild flowers ; serpents make their homes among The City 
 its broken columns ; and crawling lizards bask in the of Tagaste 
 sun where once royalty and boundless wealth held 
 sway. 
 
 Tagaste died because she sacrificed her brightest and 
 best in the mad rush to gain wealth by making cheap 
 things that catered to the whims, depraved tastes and 
 foolish tendencies of the worst. 
 
 Where once proud Tagaste stood, green weeds wave 
 in the empty casements ; the chance-sown seeds of 
 thistles sprout and blossom and bloom from between 
 the mosaics of her courtways; on the deserted 
 thresholds lichens and brambles cling in a brother- 
 hood of disorder; while the filmy ooze of a rank 
 vegetation steals over the interlaced spider-threads 
 that covers all. 
 
 The damp and the dust, the frost and the sun, the 
 fret of flooded waters, and the slow, patient inroads 
 of the mosses have combined to obliterate the work 
 of man & make his name but as a sound blown 
 upon the breath of the winds. 
 Tagaste is gone — gone like time, gone past recall. 
 Tagaste is but a memory, tinged by a dream. 
 
A DREAM AND A PROPHECY 
 
m 
 
 
 T I F E is expression. 
 "^ Art is the expression of 
 man's joy in his work. 
 Life is expression. Life is a 
 movement outward, an un- 
 folding, a development. 
 Think this out for yourself, 
 beginning with the germ, & 
 behold how all things that 
 grow develop from within! 
 To obtain a place, a free 
 field, a harmonious expan- 
 sion for your powers — this is 
 life. To be tied down, pinned 
 to a task that is repugnant, 
 and have the shrill voice of 
 
 
A Dream and Necessity whistling eternally in your ears, " Do this 
 A Prophecy or starve," is to starve — for it starves the heart, the 
 soul — and all the higher aspirations of your being 
 pine away and die. 
 
 Art is beauty, and beauty is a gratification, a peace 
 and a solace to every normal man and woman. Beau- 
 tiful sounds, beautiful colors, beautiful proportions, 
 beautiful thoughts — how our souls hunger for them ! 
 Matter is only mind in an opaque condition ; and all 
 beauty is but a symbol of spirit. 
 
 Art is the expression of man's joy in his work. You 
 cannot get joy from feeding things all day into a 
 machine. You must let the man work with hand and 
 brain, and then out of the joy of this marriage, beau- 
 ty will be born. And this beauty mirrors the best in 
 the soul of man — it shows the spirit of God that 
 runs through him. 
 
 Once a letter was sent by the Queen of Italy to 
 every reigning queen of Europe, asking that the re- 
 cipient make a promise to wear upon her clothing 
 no lace except that which was made by hand. Every 
 person who received this letter responded ; & a letter 
 from Queen Victoria was one of the first answers to 
 the appeal. 
 
 Schools were established where girls were taught to 
 make beautiful things with their hands. When they 
 acquired the necessary deftness of fingers, and the 
 
 14 
 
right taste and judgment, materials were supplied A Dream and 
 them, and a market promised for the product. Then A Prophecy 
 the Queen of Italy herself established an exchange 
 for the sale of the beautiful lace. 
 And we find Mr. Robert Barrett Browning — a man 
 with kingly pedigree, the only child of Robert 
 Browning and Elizabeth Barrett — following the idea 
 of the gracious Queen. Mr. Browning established & 
 endowed a manufactory for the making of hand- 
 made lace, as a loving monument to his father and 
 mother. This institution gives work to five hundred 
 women. I Ve called it a manufactory, but it is not 
 just that, for the work is mostly done at the homes 
 of the workers, who live in the villages scattered 
 about Venice. Each worker is paid according to the 
 quality of her work. It is quality, not quantity, that 
 counts — and so the constant incentive is held out 
 for each woman to do her best. 
 
 To this factory once came an old woman past eighty. 
 Her husband had been drowned at sea; her sons 
 had been killed in the war; and she was alone with 
 two grandchildren to care for. She came with a piece 
 of elaborate lace on which she had worked three 
 months. The work was very uneven, for the woman 
 was old, her fingers stiff, and her eyesight faulty. 
 The superintendent showed the work to Mr. Brown- 
 ing and asked : " What shall we do ? " 
 
 15 
 
A Dream and " Pay her for it, pay her for it," said Mr. Browning, 
 A Prophecy " and give it to me — she has done the best she 
 could." 
 
 And so, for several years, has come each three 
 months, hobbling on her cane, this old woman who 
 deposits her work and joyfully carries away her sil- 
 ver knotted in a handkerchief. 
 
 But most of the work that passes through the Brown- 
 ing Memorial is rarely beautiful and goes to those 
 who covet it. And strangely enough (or not) the 
 quality of the lace made is no better nor more beau- 
 tiful than that made by the nuns in the convents of 
 the Middle Ages. There are things you cannot im- 
 prove upon. You cannot better the work of Praxit- 
 eles. The marbles of the Greeks are at once the in- 
 spiration and hopeless tantalization of every man who 
 models in clay or puts chisel and mallet to stone. In 
 ethics you cannot better the Golden Rule. "In phi- 
 losophy," says Emerson, " say what you will — it is all 
 to be found in Plato." 
 
 And in book-making we cannot improve on the 
 work of the Venetians or that of the Monks of the 
 Middle Ages. All we have gained has been in speed 
 — and what we have gained in speed we have lost in 
 power. 
 
 So we find William Morris, that sanest of all men of 
 modern times, that man who could do more things 
 i6 
 
and do them well than any man of the Nineteenth A Dream and 
 Century, going back to the method of the Olden A Prophecy 
 Time in making books. He made the matrices for 
 his type himself, and with his friend, Burne-Jones, 
 cut initials and ornaments in wood for head-bands, 
 tail-pieces and title pages, and these books were 
 printed on paper made from pure linen rags, made 
 just as paper was made in the Thirteenth Century. 
 And the helpers who made these books found a joy 
 in their work; & something more than a living wage. 
 And behold, the people who loved good books 
 proved more numerous than was at first supposed — 
 and they bought the books and paid for them. In 
 making these books, it was the constant motto : 
 " How good can they be made ? — not how cheap." 
 ^ Once upon a day, a woman of noble birth in 
 England showed a friend a lace scarf made at 
 the " Browning Memorial," and this woman said, 
 " I would rather have this one piece of good lace 
 than a house /ull of lace made by a machine." Then 
 she held up a Kelmscott Book, printed on Vellum, 
 and said, " I would rather have this one book than a 
 thousand forty-nine-cent books bought at a haber- 
 dasher's!" And there were many of like opinion. 
 And so the manufacturers of furniture and laces 
 and cloth and books, gradually awoke to the fact 
 that there were some people who preferred to have 
 
 17 
 
A Dream and a few good things, than a great many cheap ones. 
 A Prophecy ^ Art is the expression of man's joy in his work. 
 
 When you read a beautiful poem, that makes your 
 heart throb with gladness, you are simply partaking 
 of the emotion that the author felt when he wrote it. 
 •f[ To possess a piece of work that the workman 
 made in joyous animation, is a source of joy to the 
 possessor. Carry this idea one step further, & you see 
 why the painting done by the hand of a man with 
 soul and spirit, can never be replaced by the work of 
 a chromo-lithograph press. 
 
 When you look upon a beautiful painting you in some 
 way catch the spirit of the artist who did the work; 
 and the armless marbles of Greece, done five hun- 
 dred years before the birth of Christ, yet subdue us 
 into silence and tears. 
 
 And this love of the work done by the marriage of 
 hand and brain can never quite go out of fashion — 
 for we are men and women, and our hopes and aims 
 and final destiny are at last one — where one enjoys, 
 all enjoy, where one suffers, all suffer. 
 Say what you will of the coldness and selfishness of 
 men, at the last we long for the companionship and 
 the fellowship of our kind. We are lost children, & 
 when alone and the darkness begins to gather, we 
 sigh for the close relationship of the brothers and 
 sisters we knew in our childhood, and cry for the 
 i8 
 
gentle arms that once rocked us to sleep. We are A Dream and 
 homesick amid this sad, mad rush for wealth and A Prophecy 
 place and power. The calm of the country invites, & 
 we fain would do with less things, and go back to 
 simplicity and rest. 
 
 And so it came about, that about the year 2001 
 men began to think, and they saw that to work all 
 day with your head, and never with your hands, 
 failed to bring content. The most successful man 
 was the most unhappy; and they turned at last from, 
 the city to the country. 
 
 They said, " Let us go home — all is so quiet there." 
 They found, having taken a little time, that there 
 was a beauty in the country they had quite forgot- 
 ten, and the melody of the water running over the 
 pebbles, hastening to the sea, was a song of gladness. 
 They saw, too, that animals and birds that lived in 
 the open air, never went into decline — that the chip- 
 munk's health did not fail, nor the quail have ner- 
 vous prostration. 
 
 The thought came to them that life is expression, & 
 art is the voice of joy that the workman finds in his 
 work. So they worked with their hands. They carved 
 in wood and made useful furniture, or they printed 
 books and illumined them, and illustrated them after 
 the manner of the Monks of the olden time. And 
 others became skillful in working with leather, and 
 
 19 
 
A Dream and bound the books in a most artistic & beautiful way. 
 A Prophecy And these people found that the best joy in life 
 comes from work well done. The women were no 
 longer the mere pets or playthings of the men — all 
 worked, and worked with heads and hands. And the 
 women were the comrades and companions of the 
 men. 
 
 So, though a man were rich, he did not feel ashamed 
 to wear the garb of a workingman. And working 
 with his hands, he came to understand and compre- 
 hend the needs of the poor. And a right understand- 
 ing and brotherhood sprang up between them. And 
 those who had formerly worked from daylight until 
 dark, now found that a few hours' work a day suf- 
 ficed. In the past, as a great many never worked 
 with their hands at all, others had to work all the 
 time. So the toilers had time to think, to read and 
 enjoy; and as those who had formerly only used 
 their heads now used their hands, nervous prostra- 
 tion took wing, and Dr. Bright and his pet disease 
 became obsolete. 
 
 And they planted trees, and forests grew ; the birds 
 came back and made the boughs melodious with 
 their songs of love. The sewage was used to fertilize 
 the land instead of to pollute the rivers ; and fishes 
 played hide and seek in the bright waters; and as 
 ways had been found to consume the carbon instead 
 
 20 
 
of liberating it in a cloud of soot, the sun's rays fell A Dream and 
 in golden beams, carrying health and healing. A Prophecy 
 
 And the people found that happiness and a reason- 
 able content followed a just and proper exercise of 
 one's faculties. They further discovered that man had 
 a triple nature : physical, mental and spiritual, and 
 that to work a certain number of hours daily, with 
 one's hands, is the part of wisdom, in that it gives 
 zest to the exercise of the mental and spiritual na- 
 tures. They further found that the exercise of the 
 spiritual or emotional nature through music, or the 
 contemplation of beauty, was a necessity as much 
 as food and drink. 
 
 They also discovered that the unrest & ruin wrought 
 through overtaxed nerves in days agone, came largely 
 from owning too many things. So they simplified 
 and found after all that the best of life is not to be 
 gotten through the ownership of many things : it 
 comes from doing the duty that lies nearest thee. 
 They said, " Life is expression, and we are endeav- 
 oring to express the beauty that is in our hearts. 
 This life is full of gladness, and mayhap it is the 
 gateway to another; and to live well here, is surely 
 the best preparation for a life to come. God is good 
 and we are not afraid." 
 
 21 
 
So here then cndeth the preachments " The City ot 
 Tagaste" and " A Dream and a Prophecy," 
 as written by Fra Elbertus, and 
 done into a book by the Roy- 
 crofters, at the Roycroft Shop, 
 which is in East Aurora, 
 New York, 
 M C M 
 
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