r workmen are such as will make modern' American 'life beautiful.' The
art we want is the art based on all the inventions of modern
civilisation, and to suit all the needs of nineteenth century life.

Do you think, for instance, that we object to machinery? I tell you we
reverence it; we reverence it when it does its proper work, when it
relieves man from ignoble and soulless labour, not when it seeks to do
that which is valuable only when wrought by the hands and hearts of men.
Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless
and ugly. And let us not mistake the means of civilisation for the end
of civilisation; steam-engine, telephone and the like, are all wonderful,
but remember that their value depends entirely on the noble uses we make
of them, on the noble spirit in which we employ them, not on the things
themselves.

It is, no doubt, a great advantage to talk to a man at the Antipodes
through a telephone; its advantage depends entirely on the value of what
the two men have to say to one another. If one merely shrieks slander
through a tube and the other whispers folly into a wire, do not think
that anybody is very much benefited by the invention.

The train that whirls an ordinary Englishman through Italy at the rate of
forty miles an hour and finally sends him home without any memory of that
lovely country but that he was cheated by a courier at Rome, or that he
got a bad dinner at Verona, does not do him or civilisation much good.
But that swift legion of fiery-footed engines that bore to the burning
ruins of Chicago the loving help and generous treasure of the world was
as noble and as beautiful as any golden troop of angels that ever fed the
hungry and clothed the naked in the antique times. As beautiful, yes;
all machinery may be beautiful when it is undecorated even. Do not seek
to decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful,
also, the line of strength and the line of beauty being one.

Give then, as I said, to your workmen of today the bright and noble
surroundings that you can yourself create. Stately and simple
architecture for your cities, bright and simple dress for your men and
women; those are the conditions of a real artistic movement. For the
artist is not concerned primarily with any theory of life but with life
itself, with the joy and loveliness that should come daily on eye and ear
for a beautiful external world.

But the simplicity must