The teaching of Ruskin is not really revolutionary in immediate practice; he advises a manufacturer to go on using his machinery; he merely wants us to set our faces towards the restoration of nature’s gifts of beauty and peace to the lives of toilers; and for ceasing to uproot sentiments of cleanliness, reverence and order by unnatural, foul, crowded and vulgar surroundings. His tastes and instincts are vehemently against machinery; but his actual requirings are moderate. It is the machine-made society we live in that distresses him, and distresses us; its occasional rough coarseness, its physical ill-health. There are, of course, scattered through _Fors_ many outbursts against machinery in general, not so carefully limited as his more weighty pronouncements. In Letter V, pp. 10, 11, for instance, the assertion is made that a man and his family can, by their own labour, given land, feed and clothe themselves without machinery; and that therefore all labour-saving appliances are so many aids to idleness. I do not know where is the proof or disproof of the assertion. All we know is that savage tribes do so live, but no others, and that it is in the time and strength saved from labour for sheer food and clothing that the best activities of humanity find room: and that civilization began with the existence of a leisured class. And now, turning to the human product of industrialism, we will take a sober view, not debiting to the factory system the evils which are inherent in human nature, but only those due to crowded town life and to employment in large rooms full of noisy machinery. If we have cured the smoke evil, and reduced hours to their present reasonable length, what remains to be done, and will it be on Ruskin’s lines? South Lancashire is often taken as the type of industrial England. There I was born and brought up, and I have lived there for the greater part of my life. I have known very intimately a great many of the working people. They are far more pale and undersized than they ought to be. Their beauty has been taken from them. The half-time system, now perishing, has interfered with their education. The damp atmosphere in the hot rooms is bad for their lungs, and minding machines is utterly monotonous. But they are excellent people--they will stand comparison with the upper classes. There is every type, of course, they are as varied as are men at the Universities, or as the ladies who go to any Church. But, speaking as we must, in general, there is a level of conduct and intelligence in those mean streets, not different except in manner from that of the suburbs. The degeneracy is, I believe, only physical, so far as it is to be debited to the conditions of their work.