But Greek civilization did not fall into decay because of the beauty and perfection with which it crowned itself in the public eye, but because of certain underlying evils and misuses in the body politic--in which again slavery and the subjection of women had their share. Greek civilization fell because it failed to recognise the dignity of all human nature; it reserved its sense of dignity for a selected race and class; it failed to recognise the dignity of all true kinds of service, and prided itself in military service alone--in that and in the philosophies and the arts. It built a wonderful temple to its gods, but failed in a very large degree to take into God the whole body of humanity over which it had control. And so, Greek civilization broke up into portions of an unimportant size and perished. At a later day--and again with the city as centre to its life of self-realisation--we get the great period of the Italian Renaissance, a period in which civic and feudal and ecclesiastical influences alternately jostled and combined. And out of these three prides arose a wonderfully complex art--tremendously expressive of what life meant for that people. And you got then (for the first time, I think), grouped under the civic arm, a new life-consciousness--the consciousness of the guilds, the workers, and the craftsmen. The dignity of labour began to assert itself; and when it did, inevitably it broke into ornament on its own account--not at the bidding of an employer, but for the honour and glory of the worker himself. And so, from that date on, the homes and halls and churches of the guilds became some of the noblest monuments to what life meant for men who had found joy in their labour. Now that did not come till the craftsman had won free from slavery and from forced labour; but when he was a freeman, with room to turn round, he built up temples to his craft, to make more evident that the true goal of labour is not use but delight. And only when it fell back into modern slavery at the hands of commercial capitalism, only then did labour’s power of spontaneous expression depart from it and become imitative and debased. I could take you further, and show you (among the survivals from our England of the Middle Ages) the “joy of the harvest” expressed in the great granaries and tithe-barns which still crown like abbey-churches the corn-lands of Home. Concerning one of these William Morris said that it stood second in his estimation among all the Gothic buildings of Europe! Think of it!--of what that means in the realisation of life-values by the age which had a mind so to celebrate man’s rest after the labour of the harvest! In those days England was called “merry” and foreigners who came to her shores reported as a national characteristic the happy looks of her people: even their faces showed adornment! And thus it is that beautiful use always clothes itself in beauty.