We condemn the town cottage housewife to ceaseless toil, with her dirty doorstep and window sills, her kitchen floor, her children who play in the street, and her intolerably swollen laundry. The glorious light of the country summer is never seen through the smoke haze of the industrial districts. Look down any long straight town street on any day, and note the limit of visibility. Fogs are often caused and always aggravated and prolonged by smoke--and after every long fog the death rate from lung diseases goes steeply up. Among the many signs of government incompetence, of narrow popular apathy, and lack of a true political sense, the present riotous licence of the makers of smoke is conspicuous. And the reform is all on Ruskin’s lines. After dirt, drink. They are not unconnected; for the dull grey street, the worried wife, the ill-tempered children, all tend to tempt a man to the cosy blaze of the bar-room, and to the excitement of a shilling on the next race. Men and women will make life interesting somehow, and if they are denied the sound pleasures appropriate to their natures they will find others.[120] We will now hear the Prophet on our machine civilization. The passages are in the famous chapter on _The Nature of Gothic_ in the Second Volume of _The Stones of Venice_ §§ XI, XII, XIII and others. These passages are among Ruskin’s earliest social writing. He was led from the examination of the characters of Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance architecture, to inquire into the character of their builders; and so was led from Art to Man as the subject matter of his life-work. This is an important transition passage, written about 1850, ten years before the decisive year when he became an economist always and an Art Professor at intervals.