because they are destructive of life-values. We have erected them into a system, and while cutting prices by such means at one end, we are mounting up costs at the other. We are promoting, maybe, a quicker circulation of the currency of the realm, but we are impoverishing the currency of the race. For that hard mechanical efficiency we are paying a price which is eating up all our real profits; quite apart from its effect in the increase of lunacy and of the unfit birth-rate and death-rate among children, it is helping to implant in the whole world of labour a bitter and a revengeful spirit which we have no right to wonder at or to blame. And the results affect us not only in our workshops but in our pastimes, by driving those whose labour is so conditioned into a more consumptive form of pleasure-seeking and relaxation. You cannot put people into inhuman conditions for long hours of each day, and expect them to be normal and humane when you turn them out to their short hours of leisure. I am pointing to conditions which you know probably as well as, or better than, I do; but I am pointing to them for the express purpose of saying that you cannot dissociate them from your national appreciation of Art. The more you can connect the worker with the raw material on the one hand and the finished product on the other, the more surely you are establishing conditions out of which national Art can grow; and the more you dissociate him
