This is all on Ruskin’s lines; very central to the preservation of all he loved. How pervasive was this enemy he did not fully see fifty years ago. He noted the deterioration of climate in England, during his lifetime, in two lectures on _The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century_. They were much derided at the time; and they contain curious passages in which the lack of light, the restless ugly clouds, the choppy breezes, the cold gloomy summers, were put down to the wrath of heaven for the sins of the people. They had in fact one simple explanation--Smoke. A man of Ruskin’s power of perception, constantly admiring beauty of landscape, could hardly have been wrong in his impression, fortified by his diaries, that there had been a change for the worse in the air and skies during his lifetime. The production of manufacturing smoke over a third (say) of England covered that period. Over all our coal fields solid particles embarrassed the air currents, and darkened the sky, and the oily products adhered stickily to the clouds and to the rain. The weather was, in truth, nature’s punishment for the haste, the greed, the popular carelessness, which tolerated the factory and furnace chimneys, and the ill-regulated firesides of thirty-five millions of people in the British Isles.[118] Coal ought not to be burnt raw, any more than meat should be eaten raw. It should be made into gas, coke, tar and sulphate of ammonia--and all of it be used. A smokeless domestic fuel made of half coked coal could be made in all gas works, and should be used everywhere, to economize our now costly coal. Electric power stations, smokelessly operated, would save much wasteful private production of power. More rigid and conscientious smoke inspection, abandoned as unpatriotic on a short view during the war, should be restored. The law should be amended and its loopholes fastened up.[119] There are many beautiful inventions ready to be used to make an end of this most gratuitous of our evils, which renders life in the industrial districts dark, dirty and ugly to the best and cleanest of the workpeople. Most municipalities in England impose an extra rate on those who use gas and electricity by taking money for the rates from those departments.