are either possible or impossible--you
can easily determine which, in any given state of human science. If the
thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if
possible, try for it. It is very Utopian to hope for the entire doing
away with drunkenness and misery out of the Canongate; but the
Utopianism is not our business--the _work_ is. It is Utopian to hope to
give every child in this kingdom the knowledge of God from its youth;
but the Utopianism is not our business--the _work_ is.

34. I have delayed you by the consideration of these two words, only in
the fear that they might be inaccurately applied to the plans I am going
to lay before you; for, though they were Utopian, and though they were
romantic, they might be none the worse for that. But they are neither.
Utopian they are not; for they are merely a proposal to do again what
has been done for hundreds of years by people whose wealth and power
were as nothing compared to ours;--and romantic they are not, in the
sense of self-sacrificing or eminently virtuous, for they are merely the
proposal to each of you that he should live in a handsomer house than he
does at present, by substituting a cheap mode of ornamentation for a
costly one. You perhaps fancied that architectural beauty was a very
costly thing. Far from it. It is architectural ugliness that is costly.
In the modern system of architecture, decoration is immoderately
expensive, because it is both wrongly placed and wrongly finished. I say
first, wrongly placed. Modern architects decorate the tops of their
buildings. Mediaeval ones decorated the bottom.[16] That makes all the
difference between seeing the ornament and not seeing it. If you bought
some pictures to decorate such a room as this, where would you put them?
On a level with the eye, I suppose, or nearly so? Not on a level with
the chandelier? If you were determined to put them up there, round the
cornice, it would be better for you not to buy them at all. You would
merely throw your money away. And the fact is, that your money _is_
being thrown away continually, by wholesale; and while you are
dissuaded, on the ground of expense, from building beautiful windows and
beautiful doors, you are continually made to pay for ornaments at the
tops of your houses, which, for all the use they are of, might as well
be in the moon. For instance, there is not, on the whole, a more studied
piece of domestic architecture in Edinburgh than the s