The Indian basket-makers wove beautiful things, but they did not know it; give them the cheap and ugly productions of our greedy "market" and they like them better. They may unconsciously produce beauty, but they do not consciously select it. Our women are far removed from the primitive simplicity that produces unconscious beauty; and they are also far removed from that broad culture and wide view of life which can intellectually grasp it. They have neither the natural instinct nor the acquired knowledge of beauty; but they do have, in million-fold accumulation, a "personal taste." The life of the woman in the home is absolutely confined to personal details. Her field of study and of work is not calculated to develop large judgment, but is calculated to develop intense feeling; and feeling on a comparatively low plane. She is forced continually to contemplate and minister to the last details of the physical wants of humanity in ceaseless daily repetition. Whatever tendency to develop artistic feeling and judgment she might have in one line of her work, is ruthlessly contradicted by the next, and the next; and her range of expression in each line is too small to allow of any satisfying growth. The very rich woman who can purchase others' things and others' judgment, or the exceptional woman who does work and study in some one line, may show development in the sense of beauty; but it is not produced at home. The love of it is there, the desire for it, most cruelly aborted; and the result of that starved beauty-sense is what we see in our familiar rooms. Being familiar, we bear with our surroundings; perhaps even love them; when we go into each other's homes we do not think their things to be beautiful; we think ours are because we are used to them; we have no appreciation of an object in its relation to the rest, or its lack of relation. The bottled discord of the woman's daily occupations if quite sufficient to account for the explosions of discord on her walls and floors. She continually has to do utterly inharmonious things, she lives in incessant effort to perform all at once and in the same place the most irreconcilable processes. She has to adjust, disadjust, and readjust her mental focus a thousand times a day; not only to things, but to actions; not only to actions, but to persons; and so, to live at all, she must develop a kind of mind that does _not object to discord_. Unity, harmony, simplicity, truth, restraint--these are not applicable in a patchwork life, however hallowed by high devotion and tender love. This is why domestic art is so low--so indistinguishable. When our great Centennial Exhibition was given us, a wave of beauty spread into thousands of homes, but it did not originate there. The White City by the lake was an inspiration to myriad lives, and wrought a lovely change in her architecture and many other arts; but the Black City by the Lake is there yet, waiting for another extra-domestic uplifting.