I have said that all art is useful. To many that may have seemed a very contentious statement. But how can one separate beauty from use if one holds that everything which delights us is useful? On that statement there is only one condition I would impose. The use in which we delight must not mean the misuse or the infliction of pain on others. In those periods of civilization to which I have referred (so magnificent in their powers of self-discovery and self-adornment), there were always dark and cruel habitations where the “art of living” was not applied. They were content that the beauty on which they prided themselves should be built up on the suffering, the oppression, or the corruption of others. In the lust of their eyes there was a blind spot, so that they cared little about the conditions imposed by their own too arrogant claim for happiness on the lives that were spent to serve them. And out of their blindness came at last the downfall of their power. So it has always been, so it always must be. I believe that beauty, delight, ornament, are as near to the object of life as anything that one can name, and that through right uses we attain to these as our goal. But it is no good claiming to possess delightful things if we do not see to it that those who make them for us have also the means to live delightfully. If man cannot make all the uses and services of life decent and wholesome as a starting-point, neither can he make life enjoyable--not, I mean, with a good conscience. If he would see God through beauty, he must see Him not here and there only, but in the “land of the living”; else (as the psalmist said) his spirit must faint utterly. Our life is built up--we know not to what ultimate end--on an infinite number of uses, functions, mechanisms. These uses enable us to live; they do not necessarily enable us to enjoy. You can quite well imagine the use of all your senses and organs so conditioned that you could not enjoy a single one of them, and yet they might still fulfil their utilitarian purpose of keeping you alive. I need not rehearse to you in troublesome detail conditions of life where everything you see is an eyesore, every touch a cause of shrinking, every sound a discord, where taste and smell become a revolt and a loathing. Our modern civilization derives many of its present comforts from conditions such as these under which thousands, nay millions, of subservient human lives become brutalised. So long as we base our ideal of wealth on individual aggrandisement, and on monetary and commercial prosperity, and not (as we should do) upon human nature itself--making it our chief aim that every life should be set free for self-realisation in ornament and delight--so long will these things be inevitable.