Volsung, Morris took his first dip in the ocean of public affa

uent protestation. "I who am writing this," he said, with a just appreciation of his ordinary attitude toward political matters, "am one of a large class of men-quiet men, who usually go about their own business, heeding public matters less than they ought, and afraid to speak in such a huge concourse as the English nation, however much they may feel, but who are now stung into bitterness by thinking how helpless they are in a public matter that touches them so closely." "I appeal," he continued, "to the workingmen, and pray them to look to it that if this shame falls upon them they will certainly remember it and be burdened by it when their day clears for them and they attain all and more than all they are now striving for." Again in the spring of 1877, when war seemed imminent, Morris appealed "to the worki

ld prevail in you at their folly and insolence. These men cannot speak of your order, of its aims, of its leaders, without a sneer or an insult; these men, if they had the power (may England perish rather!) would thwart your just aspirations, would silence you, would deliver you bound hand and foot forever to irresponsible capital. Fellow-citizens, look to it, and if you hav

tti in which the

aits of M

e wants brought out for the public enlightenment, and that the subject assigned him was 'The Results of the Incidence of Direct Taxation on the Christian Rayah,' but that he was forbidden to speak of the 'onfall of straight geld,' or other such 'English' forms. I left him musing and miserable." Musing and miserable he may well have been at finding that his duty, as he conceived it, was leading him into such unlovely paths, but the English of his polemical writings was unmistakable enough and unconfused by any affectations, Saxon or Latin. In declining to stand for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford on the occasion of Matthew Arnold's withdrawal from it, he had confessed to a peculiar inaptitude for expressing himself except in the one way in which his gift lay, and it was true that his mind was singularly inept outside its natural course. He had not a reasoning mind.

list Radicalism into a more or less definite doctrine of State Socialism." This contact was sufficient to kindle into activity the ideas implanted in his own mind during his college days. Carlyle had then thundered forth his amazing anathemas against modern civilisation and had declaimed that Gurth born thrall of Cedric, with a brass collar round his neck, was happy in comparison

: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed." Whatever his feeling may have been concerning the destructive restoration, of which he must have seen manifold examples before this period of his middle age, he seems to have awakened rather suddenly to the necessity of taking some active measure to check the ravages of the restorer. Goaded, finally, by the sight of alterations going

ng to save it,-it and whatever else of beautiful and historical is still left us on the sites of the ancient buildings we were once so famous for? Would it not be of some use once for all, and with the least delay possible, to set on foot an association for th

nd say that you by no means stand alone in the matter, and that there are many thoughtful people who would be glad to sacrifice time, money, and comfort in defence of those ancient monuments; besides, though I admit that the architects are, with very few exceptions, hopeless, because interest, habit, and an ignorance yet grosser, bind th

nst all 'restoration' that means more than keeping out wind and weather, and, by all means, literary and other, to awaken a

the restorers. Morris was made secretary of the Society, and, as long as he lived, worked loyally in its behalf, giving, in addition to time and money, the labour, which to him was grievous, of lecturing for it. He wrote a prospectus that was tran

le passages of his numerous lectures. Closing his account of pattern designing with a reference to the creation of modern or Gothic art, he says: "Never until the time of that death or cata

t which I have been speaking of, did simple folk labour for those that shall come after them. Here in the land we yet love they built their homes and temples; if not so majestically as many peoples have done, yet in such sweet accord with the familiar nature amidst which they dwelt, that when by some happy chance we come across the work they wrought, untouched by any but natural change, it fills us

history that I oppose 'restoration.' What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigour of the earlier world? As to the art that is concerned in it, a strange folly it seems to me for us who live among these bricken masses of hideousness, to waste the energies of our short lives in feebly trying to add new beauty to what is already beautiful. Is that all the surgery we have for the curing of England's spreading sore? Don't let us vex ourselves to cure the antepenultimate blunders of the world, but fall to on our own blunders. Let us leave the dead alone, and, ourselves living, build for the living and those that shall live. Meantime, my plea for our Society is this, that

e not worth anything they are not worth restoring; if they are worth a

o support the most pruden

ent, so convincing because so convinced. On the platform he stood, say his friends, like a conqueror, stalwart and sturdy, his good grey eyes flashing or twink

s he talked pure sentiment concerning social questions, characteristically declaring it to be the purest reason. His avowed belief was that "workmen should be artists and artists workmen," and this, he felt, could only be attained under the freest conditions. A workman should not be clothed in shabby garments, should not be wretchedly housed, overworked, or underfed. But neither will it profit him much if he wear good clothes, and keep short hours, and eat wholesome food, and contribute to the ugliness of the wares turned out by commerce. The idea that a man works only to earn leisure in which he does no work was shocking to him as it had been to Ruskin. Pleasant work to do, leisure for other work of a different pleasantness, this was what the workingman really wanted if only he knew it. It was clear to Morris that he himself worked "not the least in the world for the sake of earning leisure by it," but "partly driven by the fear of starvation and disgrace," and partly because he loved the work itself; and while he was ready to confess that he spent a part of his leisure "as a dog does" in contemplation, and liked it well enough, he also spent part of it in work which gave him as much pleasure as his bread-earning work, neither more nor less. Obviously if there are me

of master and pupil coincide one has only to read The Stones of Venice and comp

classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men.... We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men-divided into mere segments of men-broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail.... And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,-that we manufactu

which he again thought of in his middle age-though less tempted, perhaps. But he reasoned, logically enough, that for one man or a few men to divide his or their wealth with the poor would not advance the world by a furlong or a foot toward the state of things which he had at heart to bring about. It might raise the beneficiaries a little higher in the ranks-in other words, bring them a little closer to the dangerous middle-class, from which came the worst of their troubles, and it might also have the effect of making them a trifle more content with existing conditions. Neither effect was desirable in his eyes. A divine discontent to be spread throughout all classes was the end and aim of such Socialism as he accepted. Nothing could be done except through the antagonism of classes, which seemed in itself to provide a remedy. In News from Nowhere, his best known Socialistic romance, the name of which was perhaps suggested by Kingsley's Utopian and anagrammatic Erewhon, he puts into the mouth of an old man who is himself a survival from the days of "class slavery," a description of the imaginary change to an ideal Communism. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, it is assumed, a federation of labour made it possible for the workmen or "slaves" to establish from time to time important strikes that would sometimes stop an industry altogether for a while, and to impose upon their "masters" other restrictions that seriously interfered with the systematic conduct of commerce. The resulting "bad times" reached a crisis in the year 1952, when the "Combined Workers" determined upon the bold step of demanding a practical reversal of classes, by which t

LE DESIGN

handicrafts as they had a turn for as a part of their education, the discipline of their minds and bodies; and adults would also have opportunities of learning in the same schools." He preaches the necessity of agreeable surroundings, claiming that science duly applied would get rid of the smoke, stench, and noise of factories, and that factories and buildings in which work is carried on should be made decent, convenient, and beautiful, while workers should be given opportunities of living in quiet country homes, in small towns, or in industrial colleges, instead of being obliged to "pig together" in close city quarters. Not one of these considerations is ignored by the organisations now endeavouring in the name of civilisation to raise the standard of the community. Manual training schools, free kindergartens, health protective associations, model tenement societies, have all arisen to meet in their own ways the needs to which Morris was so keenly alive. It was not the word reform, however, but the word revolutio

continually set before them in phrases as simple and as eloquent as he could make them. Nor did he shirk the responsibilities raised by his extreme point of view. Nothing testifies more truly to his fidelity of nature and devotion to his ideal than his readiness to put aside the pursuits he loved with his whole heart and take up activities detested by him

t even when he knows he is right, which only drives him to more desperate attempts to justify his theories by the study of other people's arguments. While he was a member of the Federation (a definitely Socialist body at the time) he delivered a lecture at Oxford with the effect of rousing consternation in the University despite the fact that he had taken pains to inform the authorities of his position as an active So

opportunity afforded, he was writing for the weekly paper of the Federation, the little sheet called Justice, and also writing pamphlets f

, together with the provision of at least

o be the normal Worki

incomes above a fixed minim

of Railways, with or

all absorb all private institutions that deri

tion of the

n of agricultural and industrial armies und

the same time, Sir, I will beg you earnestly to consider if my contention is not true, that genuine Art is always an expression of pleasure in Labour?" In explaining his point of view to the public before whom he placed his little collection of Socialist lectures, he expressed his conviction that all the ugliness and vulgarity of civilisation, which his own work had forced him to look upon with grief and pain are "but the outward expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by our present form of society." The ethical and practical sides of the problem he was trying to face honestly, grew up in his mind as he dwelt upon its artistic side, and he made noble efforts to evolve schemes of practical expediency. In his reasonableness he went so far as to admit the possible usefulness of machinery in the new order toward which he was directing the attention of his followers; but he is swift to add, "for the consolation of the artists," that this usefulness will probably be but temporary; that a state of social order would lead, at first, perhap

ease myself with trying to realise the face of medi?val England," he says to the motley audience gathering at a street corner or in some dingy little hall or shed to listen to him, "the many chases and great woods, the stretches of common tillage and common pasture quite unenclosed; the rough husbandry of the tilled parts, the unimproved breeds of cattle, sheep, and swine; especially the latter, so lank and long and lathy, looking so strange to us; the strings of packhorses along the bridle-roads; of the scantiness of the wheel-roads, scarce any except those left by the Romans, and those made from monastery to monastery; the scarcity of bridges, and people using ferries instead, or fords where they could; the little towns, well bechurched, often walled; the villages just where they are now (except for those that have nothing but t