For these reasons he insisted, to my then surprise that the social reorganisation he then so ardently hoped for "was coming faster upon the Clyde than upon the Thames": he explained as for him the one main reason for his then discouragement as to the progress of London that there East and West, North and South, are not only too remote each from the other, but in their occupations all much too specialised--there to finance, there to manufactures, or here to leisure, and so on; while on the Clyde industrial organisation and social progress could not but develop together, through the very nature of the essential and working unity of the ship. Since Morris's day, a local art movement, of which he knew little, has risen to eminence, a foreign critic would say to pre-eminence, in this country at least. Since Ruskin's savage response to a Glasgow invitation to lecture--"first burn your city, and cleanse your river,"--a new generation of architects and hygienists have not a little transformed the one, and vigorous measures have been taken towards the purification of the other. That the city and university pre-eminently associated with the invention of the steam-engine, and consequently with the advent of the industrial revolution throughout the world, should, a century later, have produced a scarcely less pre-eminent leader of applied science towards the command of electricity is thus no isolated coincidence. And as political economy, which is ever the theory corresponding to our phase of industrial practice, and there some of its foremost pioneers, and later its classical exponent, Adam Smith himself, so once more there are signs at least of a corresponding wave of theoretic progress. Students of primitive civilisation and industry have now long familiarised us with their reinterpretation of what was long known as the stone age, into two very distinct [Page: 107] periods, the earlier characterised by few and rough implements, roughly used by a rude people, the second by more varied tools, of better shape, and finer edge, often of exquisite material and polish. We know that these were wielded more skilfully, by a people of higher type, better bred and better nourished; and that these, albeit of less hunting and militant life, but of pacific agricultural skill, prevailed in every way in the struggle for existence; thanks thus not only to more advanced arts, but probably above all to the higher status of woman. This distinction of Paleolithic and Neolithic ages and men, has long passed into the terminology of sociological science, and even into current speech: is it too much then, similarly, to focus the largely analogous progress which is so observable in what we have been wont to generalise too crudely as the modern Industrial Age? All are agreed that the discoveries and inventions of this extraordinary period of history constitute an epoch of material advance only paralleled, if at all, in magnitude and