There will be plenty of people to tell us
that no one can define waste of labour. No one can define sin; but each
man has his own conscience on that point and lives well or ill as he
obeys it or disobeys it. Besides, there are many things, all the trash
that Morris speaks about in the shop windows, that every one knows to be
waste. We need not trouble ourselves about the fact that art will seem
waste to the philistine and not to the artist. We must allow for
differences on that point as on most others. Some things that might
have been waste to Samuel Smiles would have been to Morris a symptom of
well-being. But he knew, and often said, that we cannot have the beauty
which was to him a symptom of well-being unless we end the waste of
labour on trash. Of luxury he said:--
By those who know of nothing better it has even been taken for
art, the divine solace of human labour, the romance of each
day's hard practice of the difficult art of living. But I say,
art cannot live beside it nor self-respect in any class of
life. Effeminacy and brutality are its companions on the right
hand and the left.
There is, we have all discovered now, only a certain amount of labour in
the country, in the world. Even the most ignorant are aware at last that
money does not create labour but only commands it, and may command it to
do what will or will not benefit us all. We were, for the purposes of
the war, much more of a fellowship than we had ever been before.
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