listen to me, if I have in these past details lost or
burdened your attention; for this is what I have chiefly to say to you.
The art of any country _is the exponent of its social and political
virtues_. I will show you that it is so in some detail, in the second
of my subsequent course of lectures; meantime accept this as one of the
things, and the most important of all things, I can positively declare
to you. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any
country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble
art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time
and circumstances. And the best skill that any teacher of art could
spend here in your help, would not end in enabling you even so much as
rightly to draw the water-lilies in the Cherwell (and though it did,
the work when done would not be worth the lilies themselves) unless
both he and you were seeking, as I trust we shall together seek, in the
laws which regulate the finest industries, the clue to the laws which
regulate all industries, and in better obedience to which we shall
actually have henceforward to live: not merely in compliance with our
own sense of what is right, but under the weight of quite literal
necessity. For the trades by which the British people has believed it
to be the highest of destinies to maintain itself, cannot now long
remain undisputed in its hands; its unemployed poor are daily becoming
more violently criminal; and a certain distress in the middle classes,
arising, _partly from their vanity in living always up to their
incomes, and partly from, their folly in imagining that they can
subsist in idleness upon usury_, will at last compel the sons and
daughters of English families to acquaint themselves with the
principles of providential economy; and to learn that food can only be
got out of the ground, and competence only secured by frugality; and
that although it is not possible for all to be occupied in the highest
arts, nor for any, guiltlessly, to pass their days in a succession of
pleasures, the most perfect mental culture possible to men is founded
on their useful energies, and their best arts and brightest happiness
are consistent, and consistent only, with their virtue.

This, I repeat, gentlemen, will soon become manifest to those among us,
and there are yet many, who are honest-hearted. And the future fate of
England depends upon the position they then take, and on their courag