The Labor enquirer., 1885-05-23
uHATrRAcrrvE LAsoa.
wflliam Morris Thinks : Bleedy Reve-
luton Would bo . sMau Price to
Pay to Abelish CemPetitien.

For our purpose of considering the re-
lations of labor to industrial art, the
wares made at the present day, the arti-
cles made for the market that is, may be
divided into two classes those that
have some pretensions to be considered
ornamental, and those that lave not.
The latter, I suppose, is much the larger
class but at any rate the important
thing to remember is that there is this
difference. Now it seems to me neces-
sary to understand that everything made
by man must be either ugly or beautiful.
Neutrality is impossible in mans handi-
work. But in times past, before the
commercial age, it did not follow that a
piece of handiwork was ugly because it
did not aim at being ornamental 1t had
certain use, which it fulfilled. and at
the same time, without apparent effort
Of the maker, 1T was beautiful. 1t grew
so, one may say, exactly as piece OF
Nature does. That is far from being the
case now. In the wares which are made
for utility only. it is rare that you find
any beauty of form they have natural
tendency to grow ugly, like a London
staryeling has. Evensinthe commonest
things, such as fences in fields and other
simple agricultural appliances, except
for few survivals, matters which have
! accidentally clung to old traditions, ugll.
ness is the rule. An ordinary house, or
piece of furniture or of attire, is not only
not beautiful, it is aggressivelv and
actively ugly, and we assume as matter
of course that it must be so. And if we
have mind for any beauty Tor pretence
of it), we must make a definite effort T;
we must give our orders for an orna-
mental article to be made for us. And 1
may say, in passing, that, order as we
please, we cannot always get our order
executed. The sense of beauty and
power of expressing it, under the present
circumstances, is one of the rarest of
gifts, so that the ordinary public have to
put up with such pretence to beadty as
the so called ornamental class of wares
can furnish them. Therefore, while the
rich man, by spending much monev, can
gather about him certain amount of
beauty, and while the man of moderate
means may be able to attain the same
end by taking an 1nfnitude of trouble,
the workingman, who has, no time to
take trouble and no money to enable
him to dispense with it, must put up
with the lack of beauty altogether.
| Here, then, is a strange thing that
whereas in the pre-commercial ages we
had beauty without paying for it, it has
now becomsan article of the market,
and, like most other market articles, is
so shamefully adulterated that we can
scarcely buy it even for our money.
know that to many people this will
seem small matter, because only those
land how few they are y who can make
their surroundings decent can under
stand the full horror, the dullness and
poverty of life which it tinvolves. For my
part, having regard to the general hap
piness of the race, say without shrink
ing that the bloodiest of violent Revo-
lutiops would be light price to pay for
the righting this wrong.
For this is not a matter of accident,
but springs from the form which the
slavery of the many has taken IN our
days It is but one of the consequences
of wage slavery. Until that wage-slavery
was ompleted and crowned by the Rev.
olution of the great machine industries
there was some attractiveness in the
work of the artisan. There is now none
or next to none; and the reason why
the ornamental wares aforementioned
are so adulterated is because the very
ornament itself is but part of the
machine labor, made to sell, and not for
use, whether it be done by human
machines or non-human ones.
1t is no exaggeration to say that our
civilization has destroyed the attractive
ness of labor, and that by more means
than one; by lengthening the hours of
labor bv intenslfying the labor during
it's continuance by the forcing of the
workmen into noisy, dirty, crowded fac
tories by the aggregation of the popu-
latlon into cities and manufacturing dis
tricts, and the consequent destruction
OF all beauty and decency of surround
ings by the levelling all intelligence and
excellence of workmanship by means of
machinery, and the consequent gradual
extinction of the skilled craftsman. All
this is the exact contrary of the condi-
tions under which the spontaneous art of
past ages was produced. Our forefathers
of the Middle Ages worked shorter
hours than we do (even since the passing
of the factory acts) and had more holi-
days. They worked deliberately and
thoughtfully as all artists do; they
worked in their own homes and had
plenty of elbow room the unspolled
country came up to their very doors and,
except in their dreams of hell-if even
there-they could have had no concep
ton of the gfories of the Black Country
or South Lancashire, which 1 heard a
famous demagogue the other night emu
merating among the blessings of peace,
such peace as he could conceive Of
Finally all their work denenned ON