Many sentimentalists—and it is difficult not to sympathise with them—regret the manner in which manufacture is thus superseding craftsmanship, or that kind of production in which the beauty or excellence of the product is the direct result and expression of the skill of one producer. But this natural regret, though most frequently expressed by socialists, is defensible only on grounds of the narrowest social exclusiveness. That the {255} artist-craftsman who gives his talents directly to each particular commodity in the production of which he is concerned—a silver cup, or a lamp, or a curiously-designed carpet, or a printed volume—will produce objects having a charm which is wanting in similar objects produced by the methods of the manufacturer is, no doubt, true. But great artist-craftsmen being few in number, the beautiful objects they make by the craftsman’s methods are few in number also, and are consequently obtainable by a few persons only; whilst the objects inferior, but approximately similar to them, which the great manufacturer multiplies in indefinite quantities, are accessible to the many, who, under any social system, must either have these or have nothing of the kind at all. An artist-craftsman, for example, such as the late Mr. William Morris, or a transcriber and illuminator in a mediæval monastery, could produce a volume indefinitely more beautiful than any product of the steam printing-press; but a book which the methods of the manufacturer would admit of being sold for sixpence might cost, if produced by the craftsman, twice that number of pounds; and it is easy to see that, supposing a study of the Bible to be desirable, a village comprising four hundred and eighty families would be benefited more by each family having a sixpenny Bible of its own than it would by the existence of one sumptuous copy chained to a desk in the village church or reading-room.