"In an age where needles are threaded by machinery at the rate of nearly one per second; where embroideries are produced by a machine process which reverses the old method in moving the cloth up to fixed needles; where Sunlight Soap is shaped, cut, boxed, packed into cases, nailed up, labelled, and even sent to the lighters by machinery, so that hand labour is almost entirely superseded; it seems odd and, in fact, quite out of date and uncommercial to print wall-papers entirely by hand process. "The up-to-date wall-paper machine turns out most wonderful productions. It is able to imitate almost any fabric; tapestries, Gobelins, laces, and even tries to copy artistic stencilling in gradated tints. It manages to deceive the inartistic buyer to a large extent, in fact, there is hardly any fabric that the modern demand for 'sham' does not expect the wall-paper machine to imitate. "However, in spite of all these so-called achievements, the modest hand-printing table that existed at the time of wigs and snuff-boxes is still surviving more or less in its old-fashioned simple construction. And why is this so?" He then explains why a hand-printed paper is always preferred to a machine paper by the person of taste, whose purse is not too slender. Seven reasons are given for their artistic superiority. "1. Machine papers can be printed in thin colours only, which means a thin, loose colour effect. "2. In machine papers the whole of the various colours are printed at one operation, one on the top of another. In hand-printed papers, no colours touch each other until dry, and so each colour remains pure. "3. Large surfaces, such as big leaves, large flat flowers, broad stripes that have to be printed in one colour, are never successful in machines, wanting solidity of colour. Hand-printed papers run no such risk. "4. The machine limits the variety of papers to the flat kind; to flat surfaces supplied by the paper mills in reels. "5. Flaws, irregularities, and so on, when occurring in machine goods, run through many yards, owing to the necessary rapidity of printing, and the difficulty of stopping the machine; whilst every block repeat of pattern in the hand-printed goods is at once visible to the printer, who rectifies any defect before printing another impression, and so controls every yard. "6. The hand-printed papers, being printed from wood blocks (only dots and thin lines subject to injury being inserted in brass) show more softness in the printing than papers printed from machine rollers that have to be made in brass.