its Socialist appeal to the working class. A veteran Glasgow Green debater, 'Old John Torley,' as fiery in speech as in the colour of his hair, but withal brimful of good-humour, made a breezy onslaught on those 'High Art Socialists who designed silk curtains and velvet cushions, and got out hand-printed books bound in Russian leather, which only the idle spongers on the toil of the workers could afford to buy.'
In reply to this and several other questions relating to art, Morris made a personal statement in which he reaffirmed in substance what on many previous and after occasions he found it necessary to say respecting his own position. He acknowledged that under present-day conditions of wealth and labour the pursuit of art and literature was to men like himself a mere sort of truant boy's pastime—a fiddling while Rome was burning. 'For myself,' he said, 'I often feel conscience-stricken about it, and if I knew any corner of the world where there was social equality I should pack up and go there at once. But I am not attracted, as some good men both in present and bygone times have been, with the idea of going out into the wilderness, either as an anchorite or as one of a group of Socialist Fifth Monarchy men. I don't want to get out from among my fellow men, for with all their faults—which are not theirs only but our own—I like them and want to live and work among them. My Utopia must be pitched square in the midst of them or nowhere. But, as I say, I often feel conscience-stricken about enjoying myself, and enjoy myself much I confess I do in my art and literary work, while the mass of my fellows are doomed to such a sordid and miserable life of servitude around me. Were it not for my work and the hope of Socialism, I believe life would be positively unendurable to me—as in truth it should be to every man possessed of any aesthetic or moral feeling at all.'
At the evening meeting Morris made only a short speech as chairman, alluding good-humouredly to the criticisms of the press on his own and his colleagues' addresses at the Art
