and also as a representation of what we should endeavour to realise. It will, at all events, they believe, do this; it will develop our feelings, and guide our actions in the right direction.

This, however, by no means follows. In the first place, the most attractive features in the ideal picture may be impossibilities; in the second place, the features in actual life which are made most hateful by the contrast may be necessities, and the only result of the ideal picture may be to increase men's discontent with what they can never remove, and to set them striving after what they can never obtain. If a man, then, wishes to ameliorate the conditions of society, it is not enough that he should be discontented with existing evils, but he should be discontented only with such of these as are capable of being done away with. Of those that cannot be done away with, the evil is only magnified—indeed, in many cases it is produced-by contrast with false ideals, which suggest that they can be.

Suppose, for instance, that Socialists took it into their heads that death was not a necessity, and that nothing but capitalistic enterprise prevented everyone from enjoying an eternal youth; what a state of madness and misery they would produce amongst those who believed in them! What a dreadful revolution they might then easily excite-a dreadful revolution, and with what a ridiculous ending! I do not suppose Mr. Morris to believe that the Social Democratic Federation can do away with death; but many of the factors of civilisation, such as inequality, result just as inevitably from the constitution of man; and Mr. Morris, in trying to set men against them, is, instead of putting anyone in the way to remove them, merely taking from his disciples all manly power of bearing them. What evils are removable, and what not removable, which we ought to be discontented with, and which we ought to accept and bear, are questions to be determined partly by common-sense, partly by observation and careful reasoning, guided by commonThe Socialists observe and reason, but they have not got common-sense to guide them. Let us go to Mr. Morris, and see how he shows us this.

sense.

He specially tells us in the paper we are now dealing with that his subject is not the economic side of Socialism; but he indicates

clearly enough what, on the economic side, it is. It is a scheme for taking advantage of the increased wealth of the world, in order to distribute an equal competence to all. This equal distribution is, of course, according to him, to be desired on the grounds ordinarily set forth by levellers; but what he is here specially urging is that it is to be desired also on grounds somewhat different-not on the right of all men to money and comfort, but on the right of all men to the enjoyment of art and beauty; and his special ground, as here set forth by him, against the existing condition of things, is not that it produces destitution, but that it produces ugliness. He several times alludes to the condition of manufacturing districts like Lancashire-to the grimy streets, the clouded skies, and the chimneys with their perpetual smoke. He alludes again to modern utilitarian agriculture, and complains, with considerable justice, that scientific farming has a fatal tendency to injure our rural land. scapes; and, above all, he complains that the conditions of modern labour preclude all exercise of art on the part of the labourer. Taken as a whole, Mr. Morris's complaints come to this: That the labourers, the producers, or, in other words, the great mass of the people, are, under the existing conditions of production, too poor to buy good works of art for themselves, and too uneducated to enjoy them; that their surroundings are hostile to the cultivation or the enjoyment of their artistic sense; that their work, as now arranged, is hostile to all exercise of any artistic instinct; and lastly, that society, as now constituted, is hostile to the exercise or the enjoyment of true art in anybody.

Now, these last two propositions have no doubt a large amount of truth in them. To deal with the last first, the age is certainly not an age of great art; but there are other causes which account for this, far better than that assigned by Mr. Morris. Mr. Morris says that the cause is inequality. Causes far more obvious, and far truer, are the loss or abeyance of definite religious faith, and the similar loss or abeyance of any definite social or political faith. If I may venture an opinion on this special subject, I should say that the two essential conditions of great art were belief in some definite religion universally accepted, and belief in the social order at the time prevailing.

It is impossible, however, to deal with this question here, so I will pass on to the other proposition of Mr. Morris: That labour, as now arranged, is fatal to the exercise of artistic instinct in the labourers. As I have just admitted, this is entirely true, and the only answer we can make to Mr. Morris is, firstly, that it is inevitable, and, secondly, that it is not so tragic a matter as he imagines, It is inevitable for this reason: labour is ceasing to be artistic, not because men's incomes are divided unequally, but because their labour is divided more and more minutely.

"The first point in the Socialist ideal of art is," says Mr. Morris, "that it should be common to the whole people, and this can only be the case if it comes to be recognised that art should be an integral part of all manufactured wares that have definite form and are intended for any endurance. . . . Furthermore," he continues, "in the making of wares there should be some of the spirit of the handicraftsman. . . . Now, the essential spirit of the handicraftsman is the instinct for looking at the wares in themselves, and their essential use, as the object of his work. Their secondary uses, the exigencies of the market, are nothing to him." The answer to all this is that, as wares are produced now, hardly any one worker can be said to produce any one ware. Each man produces some small bit of a ware, or some unrecognisable proportion of it, or some part of a part of something that will hereafter produce a part of it. If the artistic element in work means anything more than the conscientious element, the thorough element, or the industrious element, it would be not only impossible but useless and out of place among the immense majority of workmen-even those who assist in the production of wares which, when complete, have an artistic character. What art can there be in planing the slide-valve of a steam engine? or in building the plain brick wall of a hideous warehouse? There may be skill in both operations, but there is no room for art. Art was only possible to workmen generally when the workman generally did what he generally does no longer-make the whole of some given ware, or at all events some part of it which could be recognised as his own. But not only does the workman, as a fact, generally do this no longer : the very conditions of modern production make it impossible that he should do so.

Perhaps Mr. Morris will say that this is his very point, and that what he is urging is that these modern conditions should be altered. If that is his contention, here is the obvious reply to it. One of the principal reasons which cause Socialists to advocate the redistribution of wealth is the fact that in the modern world wealth has increased so enormously, and that there is so much of it to be distributed. But why and how has it increased? It has increased simply by those very methods of production which it would seem that Mr. Morris is anxious to do away with. It has increased, and is increasing, by the division of labour, by that very process which separates more and more each single workman from each single completed work. It is indeed no mere epigram, it is a sober and literal statement of fact, to say that in proportion as the possibility of art in ordinary labour decreases, the wealth of the community, however distributed, increases; and conversely, in proportion as we restore the conditions which make art in ordinary labour possible, the gross product of labour available for distribution will decrease. It is, of course, quite open to the Socialists to maintain that a decrease of this kind. would be no real evil, and that we might be morally much richer whilst we were materially much poorer. This position, whatever its value, is at least tenable. But the position is not tenable which the Socialists actually occupy-the position that wealth should be redistributed because so much of it is produced, but redistributed under conditions that would make its production impossible.

I have several times called attention in other places to the following fact. If we compare the gross income of this country to-day with its gross income between forty and fifty years ago, we shall find, after making allowance for the increase of population, that the gross income of the working classes now is greater than the entire income of all classes then. In other words-making, as I say, all allowance for the increase of population—what was the entire wealth of England fifty years ago has, in the course of fifty years, been distributed amongst the working classes. And yet the working classes are still asking for more, and Mr. Morris is urging them to ask for a great deal more. Evidently, then, they would not tolerate any diminution in the amount of wealth produced. They want to get

at the millions of the rich, not to destroy them; still less to destroy those millions which they did not possess fifty years ago, and which they now do possess. Yet this is precisely what would happen if Mr. Morris's advice were followed. In order to enable the people to enjoy art and practise art, he wishes to give them an increased share of riches ; and, in order to make art generally possible, he wishes to destroy the conditions under which the riches are produced. Mr. Morris in fact wishes to eat his cake and keep it; which may be possible in a dream, but is possible nowhere else.

The only comfort that can be offered him is one that he himself will reject: but none the less is it enough for ordinary peopleespecially the people in the Socialist's sense of the word. Let Mr. Morris ask any respectable artisan whether he would sooner have a vulgar cheap lamp and a vulgar cheap fireplace, or an artistic lamp and no fireplace, or else an artistic fireplace and no lamp, and he will certainly answer that getting rid of his art is a remarkably cheap way of doubling his practical comfort.

The real fact is that though the conditions of production now are hostile to art in a way they were not formerly, the artistic injury inflicted on the community is very slight indeed. Mr. Whistler takes a far truer view of the case than Mr. Morris. Mr. Whistler has pointed out that it is an entire hallucination to conceive of the ages which produced the greatest art as ages in which the mass of men were more artistic than at present. The reason that wares then were, as a rule, more artistic than wares now, was that fewer wares were made, and the men who took to making them were merely the men who had some artistic bent. But it is idle to imagine that, in any age whatever, either artistic power or artistic appreciation could in any sense be said to be general throughout the community. Mr. Whistler's view is strikingly illustrated by the fact that the word which in ancient Athens stood for gross, vulgar, and tasteless was a word which meant literally "workman-like," or "like a mechanic." The truth is that Mr. Morris's past age, when art was the property of all, and appreciated by all, is as unreal as the Golden Age of Rousseau. The State of Art is as unscientific, as anti-scientific an idea as the State of Nature.

Equally anti-scientific, equally contrary to evidence, is the