I will give you an instance, quite away from sweated labour conditions, where you will see at once how wasteful and opposed to Art is this system of breaking up craftsmanship into departments. It was an architect who told me that the following system is quite frequently followed in dealing with the stone out of which we build the outside walls of our modern churches. It is hewn at the quarries into a rough surface, thoroughly expressive of the stonemason’s craft, and not in any way too rough for its purpose. It is then taken and submitted by machinery to a grinding process which makes it mechanically smooth, and it is then handed over to other workmen who give back to it a chiselled surface of an absolutely uniform and mechanical character which expresses nothing. And with that wanton and wasteful lie we are content to set up temples to the God of Truth! Now if the Church has become so blind to the values of life, and so lacking in any standard of honour toward the labour of men’s hands, as to allow itself to be so clothed in falsehood, yet I do still plead that those who call themselves artists shall protest by all means in their power against the systematisation of such indignities toward handicraft. That is the sort of thing against which any national Art training we have ought to fight. How can we fight? Best of all, I believe, by establishing a standard of honour toward manual labour; and, quite definitely, wherever we have Art schools, by training all students to hate and despise shams and to loathe all waste of labour. But, perhaps, the most direct way would be for the State to set up, in every town, in connection with its Art schools and its technical schools, a standard of honesty by practical demonstration, in the staple industry of the locality. I would not trouble, so long as that industry had a useful purpose, how much or how little it was connected with Art; but I would give the youth of that place the chance of an honest apprenticeship under true human conditions to the trade in which they might be called upon to spend their lives. I would not have those schools of labour adopt any amateurishness of method or standard; they should not obstinately reject the aid of machinery where machinery can relieve monotony, but they should very carefully consider at what stage the dehumanising element came in, either by substituting mechanism for skill, or by separating the worker too much from his work in its completed form. And from those schools of labour I would allow people to purchase all the work of these State-apprentices which their master-craftsmen could pass as being of a standard quality. They would not compete in point of cheapness with the trade article, for their price would almost certainly be higher, but they would, I trust, compete in point of quality and design; and by exhibiting a standard, and making the thing procurable, they might create a demand which the very trade itself would at last be forced to recognise.