us is living a simple life. Once more I say that the great foe of art (and life) is luxury.'
'Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.'
'Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement. A sanded floor and white-washed walls, and the green trees and flowering meads and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined and the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?'
'There are two virtues much needed in modern life if it is ever to become sweet, and I am quite sure they are absolutely necessary in sowing the seed of an art which is to be made by the people, as a happiness to the maker and user. These are honesty and simplicity of life.' ('The Art of the People.')
'I have never been in a rich man's house which would not have looked better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-tenths of all it held.' (Ibid.)
'Luxury cannot exist without slavery of some kind or other, and its abolition would be blessed, like the abolition of other slaveries, by the freeing of both the slaves and their masters.' (Ibid.)
Perhaps the most distinctive as well as the most prophetic part of his teaching was his exaltation of work. No other writer, ancient or modern, that I know of, has so glorified work for its own sake. If ever man can be said to have believed in work as the greatest human pleasure and as the highest form of worship, it was he. In this respect his teaching stands out almost as uniquely from the teaching in prevalent Socialist literature as from that of literature generally. Both Carlyle and Ruskin had, it is true, proclaimed the nobility of work; but there was in their axioms a preceptorial and disciplinary note. Work with them has still something of the Old Testament penitential curse upon
