Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/233

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Art and Citizenship
213

in point of quality and design; and by exhibiting a standard, and making the thing procurable, they might create a demand which the very trade itself would at last be forced to recognise.

This is but a very bald and brief statement of the kind of extension I mean; but what I want to put to you is this, that wherever a nation has turned from agriculture to trade, there, if you want national Art you must invade those trade conditions and set up your standard of honour, not outside, but in the trades themselves; you must get hold of those who are going to be your workers and craftsmen and put into them (by exhibiting to them manual labour under right human conditions the old craftsman's pride which existed in the days of the Guilds, when the trade unions were not merely organisations to secure good wages, but to secure good work, and to maintain a standard of honour in labour. But you must not stop there. To make your training in any true sense national you must make it characteristic, or rather it must make itself. It must aim at bringing out racial and local character; and before it can do so we must recover that love of locality which we have so largely lost. A mere multiplication of schools and classes where a departmental system evolved at some city centre is put in force, is not national: it is only metropolitan, perhaps only departmental. You can put such a system, in a certain superficial way, into the heads and hands of your local students, but