least claim the merit of having worked indifferent well and of being obviously capable of improvement, if the community will only apply a little more sense to the objects on which it spends its money. Under it the value of our work, like that of everything else, is what it will fetch—that is, what we can get for it out of our fellows. If they are vulgar, tasteless and stupid we can sell them rubbish and grow fat on them, if we happen to be greedy rogues. The fact that many of them are vulgar, tasteless and stupid thus gives greedy rogues a chance of which they make ready use; and so the unpleasant sight is daily seen of greedy rogues battening on vulgar stupidity, and so getting for themselves all the power and influence that wealth brings with it. And then moralists naturally exclaim that there is dreadful villainy abroad, and that the laws ought to be made much stricter for catching and punishing it; and short-cutting reformers cry out that there is no remedy for such a system except its abolition and the substitution of a new way of rewarding people which shall not in any way depend on the price at which they can sell their work. But surely the true remedy, though a terribly slow one, is for the community to contain a smaller and smaller
