But there, mind you, in trade, lies to-day the very life of the nation; for the life of our teeming millions depends on it. By our industrial specialisation in the pursuit of wealth vast numbers of us have ceased to be self-supporting in the necessaries of life. And the question for artists is, are we basing our national life on conditions that cannot secure permanence and stability in the things which we produce? Is it a necessary condition of our industrial development that things should have a shorter life and we a shorter use for them than in the old days? To the artist the drawback of machine-made things is not necessarily in the mechanism of their production (for in some cases your machine relieves the human hand of a hard and wearing monotony), but there is a very obvious drawback if it imposes upon the worker merely another form of hard and wearing monotony, and at the same time shortens the life of the thing produced. If handicraft does not offer to the worker worthier conditions for hand and brain, and insure longer life in the thing produced, it is no good pinning our faith to it. Eliminate it, and let machinery take its place. You have not, then, in the transfer, destroyed any right values, and you are not going counter to the conditions which tend to produce national Art. But, as an example of the particular value which does sometimes attach to hand labour (irrespective of its artistic value), I have here a small unused sample of chair-cover material of English make, produced about eighty years ago, at a probable cost--so I am told by experts--of under £2 the square yard. The chairs it was made to cover are now in my possession. During the twenty-five years of my own personal acquaintance with them they have had plenty of hard wear; but even at the corners that material has not yet begun to wear out; and the colour has only become softer and more mellow in quality. Within the last ten years I endeavoured to get that covering matched in a modern material, and I paid for the nearest match I could get about one-fifth of the price I have quoted. That material has already gone shabby; and where it is most worn and faded the colour, instead of mellowing, has gone dead and dirty in quality. The older material will probably outlast my time.