certain others are partly supported by County Councils, but most are free from official support and its accompanying control, and represent voluntary organisation and working.

The rapid growth of this interesting movement is evidenced by the fact that, beginning with 40 classes in 1884, it has now considerably more than 500 classes at work. While many men and women of influence in art and in society have taken an active part in endowing and establishing centres of this work, notably Mr. and Mrs. G. F. Watts, and Lady Brownlow, the inspiration has in large measure come visibly from Mr. Ruskin. In the neighbourhood of his northern home a number of hand industries, the embodiments of his teaching, indicate his direct influence. Among the most interesting of these is one which bears his name, the “ Ruskin Linen Industry" of Keswick, in which teaching is given. at cottage homes in spinning, weaving, embroidery, and lace, and the more ambitious experiment in teaching a variety of handicrafts undertaken by Mrs. and Miss Harris at Kirkby Lonsdale in Westmoreland.

Nor does this work stand by itself as a gallant attempt to stem the inevitable encroachments of machine industry, as some would represent. It is rather to be regarded as an informal educational current in a wider and more potent movement of modern taste, marking not a protest, but a progress, a demand for the free individual expression of art-power in all forms of plastic material both for use and decoration, and a corresponding demand on the part of the consumer that his individual tastes and needs shall be satisfied.

It is, in a word, a practical informal attempt of a

civilised society to mark out for itself the reasonable limits of machine-production, and to insist that "cheapness" shall not dominate the whole industrial world to the detriment of the pleasure and benefit arising from good work to the worker and the consumer. Such a movement neither hopes nor seeks to restore medievalism in industry, nor does it profess hostility to machinery, but it insists that machines shall be confined to the heavy, dull, monotonous, and therefore inhuman processes of work, while for the skill of human hand and eye shall be preserved all work which is pleasant and educative in its doing, and the skill and character of which contribute pleasure and profit to its use.

CHAPTER XIII.

SUMMARY OF MR. RUSKIN'S WORK AND INFLUENCE.

§ 4. The general nature of Ruskin's protest. § 2. His teaching compared with that of Morris and Tolstoy. § 3. A union of Hebraism and Hellenism. § 4. Summary of economic teaching. § 5. The unifying influences in Ruskin's thought. § 6. Intellectual exclusiveness. § 7. Ruskin's literary qualities as a source of influence. § 8. A distinctively "practical " teacher.

In trying to mark as clearly as we may the place which Mr. Ruskin occupies among the social reformers of his age, it is of paramount importance to keep in mind his artistic temperament and training. For though the energy and inspiration of his social teaching was distinctively moral in character, the basis of his discontent with existing industrial and social conditions, and the forms of his constructive policy, are referable to the demands of an artistic nature. The definite social evils which first appealed to him were the bad workmanship imposed upon most workmen by the industrial conditions of their age, the degradation of the outward form of cities, and in particular of public and domestic architecture, the dominance which conventional and mechanical modes of work had obtained both in the fine arts and in the industries, and in general the power exercised by irresponsible wealth to corrupt the finest human qualities, and to uglify the outward aspects of life. It was

the search into the causes of bad art, and of false ideas about art, that inevitably led him to detect the poisoning of the springs of individual and social conduct, and to trace in the greatness and the fall of nations the operation of forces which, chiefly economic in their outward working, are distinctively spiritual in their natural sources. This constant widening of ideas and sentiments, from art in its narrow connotation to an art which should include all sound work, and thence to the conception of an art first of individual then of social life, was, to a mind like Mr. Ruskin's, endowed at once with powerful and fearless analytic and constructive faculties, an inevitable process. Whereas the tendency of industrial economists, labouring for the cause of social reform, has almost invariably lain towards a separation of work and enjoyment, the processes of production and consumption, with an almost exclusive stress upon the latter, as if social as well as individual welfare consisted in the multiplication of commodities; the social revolt from the ranks of literature and art has made distinctively for the gospel of work, — work for all, good in quality, and valued for its own sake as well as for its result. This is the common note in the social teaching of men so widely different in many of their principles of life and modes of conduct as Emerson, Carlyle, Zola, Ibsen, William Morris, and Tolstoy. With such men this gospel of good work is no mere moral platitude, but a definite protest against the severance of work and life, process and result, producer and consumer, which the excessive specialisation of industry has forced upon modern life.

§ 2. The distinctive part which may be assigned to Mr. Ruskin in this many-voiced protest will be best

marked by a brief comparison of his general attitude with the equally uncompromising attitude of two of his contemporaries, William Morris and Tolstoy. Many principles all three have in common, the rejection of commercial competition and profit-seeking as destructive of good work, and of the sense of brotherhood; the insistence upon the need and duty of manual labour for all, and a repudiation of the sophistry by which the intellectual and cultured classes seek to evade this natural law; a denunciation of the machine-made town, and a leaning towards the simplest forms of rural life. Both in their work of criticism and of reconstruction there are many important points of agreement. Yet the widest temperamental differences of attitude towards work and life separate the three thinkers. Taking "News from Nowhere as at once the fullest and most concrete expression of Morris's social reform teaching, we find it resolved into a single precept, "Do as you like." A society in which every one at once does what he likes, and likes what he does, is the ideal that is presented. All sense of pain and irksomeness is brushed away from labour; duty either towards oneself, one's neighbours, or society nowhere presents itself as a necessary motive. The artist even now likes what he does; therefore, place all work on the footing of an art, the necessary work will all be done for its own sake, and for the sake of the pleasure got from doing it. Now Mr. Ruskin is at once more definitely moral and more practical. He perceives that much work is not inherently and immediately desirable; that most of the finest art-work is based upon toil and monotony of preparation; that neither a sense of duty nor social compulsion can be