Today the ancient, ancestral wisdom of the hand has been largely replaced by the simple movement of the machine operator. Our glass and china, furniture, books, and textiles are almost entirely products of the machine. That machine-made goods can be well-designed and good-looking no one now denies; nevertheless, there are many who believe that if the old skills of hand-workers were to die out altogether, it would be a disaster. Their arguments are, roughly, three. First, that the machine is by its nature a mass producer, and that objects made in ones and twos can be made better, even cheaper, by an individual craftsman than by a machine; secondly, that the human hand with relatively simple tools can produce objects of a quality permanently beyond the reach of the machine; thirdly, that it is not good for mankind if people lost the ability to create with their hands.