design up and adapts it to his purpose as well as he can; the design is spoilt, and when executed looks not better but worse than the ordinary cut and dried trade design."
"Of late years," he stated in the same evidence, "there has arisen in London a great number of half professional designers, people who would be glad to get work in designing. These people are generally very uneducated in the technique of the arts they design for, which is a great drawback."
Between the workman who had no understanding of design and the designer who had no understanding of execution, the case of the manual arts was hopeless indeed. In both cases alike the root of the evil was sheer ignorance; and this ignorance was directly due to want, in one case as much as the other, of proper education; as that again was due to the false division of labour—the disintegration of labour, as it should more properly be called—which forbade artist and workman alike to know what they were at.
Thus stated the case seems simple enough. But the simplest truths are often the last to be applied to practice. The doctrines laid down by Morris before the Commission were then startling and almost revolutionary; even now but little progress has been made in carrying them out, though their abstract truth is generally admitted. There is a school of designers now, for the most part formed under the influence of Morris's teaching, who design with direct knowledge of the manufacturing processes. But the encouragement given by the State to the art of designing still takes the form of prizes for designs in the air. "Not enough attention is given," Morris said in his evidence, "to the turning out of the actual goods themselves. We cannot give prizes for the things turned out, we
