272 THE AMERICAX JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
the solitary man of genius at the head of the work there had been a
living inherited tradition throughout the workshop He carried
on his business as a manufacturer, not because he wished to make mone}-, but because he wished to make the things he manufactured. In every manual art which he touched he was a skilled expert ; in the art of monev-inaking he remained to the end an amateur. Through- out he regarded material with the eye of the artist, and labor with the eye of a fellow-laborer."
Many paragraphs indicate the growth of his influence, some words of which may be cited. Mr. Mackail writes :
.^bout Morris himself a group of artists and craftsmen were gathering who, without following his principles to their logical issues in joining any socialist organization, were profoundly permeated with his ideas on the most fruitful side, that of the regeneration, by continued and combined individual
effort, of the decaying arts of life This group of craftsmen were drawn
together from many different quarters, and worked in very various methods ; but, each in his own sphere, all alike consciously aimed at a renaissance of the decorative arts, which should act at once through and toward more humanized conditions of life, both for the worker and for those for whom he worked.
4. Regarding the three years of his life in which he entered most actively into spreading the social views he held, both before and after the projjagandist period, many enlightening pages are written. Of the year 1877, in connection with the outcome of active interest in the Eastern Question, the biographer writes ;
When the crisis in the East was fairly past, it left Morris thoroughly in touch with the Radical leaders of the working class in London, and well acquainted with the social and economic ideas, which, under the influence of widening education and of the international movement among the working classes, were beginning to transform their political creed from an individualist Radicalism into a more or less definite doctrine of State Socialism."
Of a letter written that year it is noted : "There is the old keen eye for scenery, but there is also a new tone, that of the social observer, one might almost say the political theorist."
When on the point of leaving Kelmscott Manor for the city in the fall of 1880, he writes :
I can't pretend not to feel being out of this house and its surroundings as a great loss. I have more than ever at my heart the importance of people living in beautiful places ; I mean the sort of beauty which would be attain- able by all, if people could but begin to long for it. I do most earnestly
