taste, such individuality in consumption must impose a
corresponding individuality in production, and machinery will be
dethroned from industry. Let us take the example of the clothing
trade. Provided the wearing public will consent to wear clothes
conforming to certain common patterns and shapes which are only
approximate "fits," machinery can be used to make these clothes; but
if every person required his own taste to be consulted, and insisted
upon an exactitude of fit and a conformity to his own special ideas of
comfort, the work could no longer be done by machinery, and would
require the skill of an "artist." It is precisely upon this issue that
the conflict of machine _versus_ hand-labour is still fought out. The
most highly-finished articles in the clothing, and boot trades are
still hand-made; the best golf-clubs, fishing-rods, cricket bats,
embody a large amount of high manual skill, though articles of fair
average make are turned out chiefly by machinery in large quantities.
These hand-made goods are produced for a small portion of the
consuming public, whose education and refinement of taste induces them
to prefer spending their money upon a smaller quantity of commodities
adjusted in character to their individual needs, than upon a larger
quantity of common commodities.

Assuming that industrial evolution places an increasing proportion of
the consuming public in secure possession of the prime physical
necessaries of life, it is surely possible that they too may come to
value less highly a quantitative increase in consumption, and may
develop individuality of tastes which require individual production
for their satisfaction. In proportion as this happens, hand-work or
art must play a more important part in these industries, and may be
able to repel the further encroachments of machinery, or even to drive
it out of some of the industrial territory it has annexed. But
although the illustration of the present condition of the clothing
trades serves to indicate the nature of the contest between machinery
and art in the region of ordinary material consumption, it is not
suggested that social progress will, or ought to, expel machinery from
most of the industries it controls, or to prevent its application to
industries which it has not yet reached. The luxury and foppish
refinement of a small section of "fashionable" society, unnaturally
relieved of the wholesome necessity of work, cannot be taken as an
indicatio