Page:Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris - A Summary of the Principles of Socialism (1884).djvu/39

 produces are made for the consumption of poor and degraded people without leisure or taste wherewith to discern beauty, without money or labour to pay for excellence of workmanship—this system makes labour so repulsive and burdensome that art, in the long run, is impossible under’ it. Instead of the pleasant, intellectual, fruitful labour of the middle-ages, we have the barren, hideous drudgery of the factory and the cotton-mill. While it lasts all the ordinary surroundings of life must of necessity be ugly and brutal, and what of art is left for a time, depending as it does, not on its own life, but on the memory of past days of glory and beauty, must be produced by men of exceptional gifts, living isolated amidst the ugliness and brutality of their own time and protesting against the spirit of their own age. Thus the capitalist system threatens to dry up the very springs of all art, that is, of the external beauty of life, and to reduce the world to a state of barbarism.

The proletariat, however, as already remarked, were not crushed into this helplessness in England without having struggled against the meanest tyranny that ever oppressed them. From the end of the last century, when Trade Societies were established throughout the kingdom, vainly endeavouring to make head against the steadily growing power of capital, the working classes kept up an increasing agitation in favour of a more reasonable lot for themselves and their children. Another serious class fight had begun. What the workers saw was this:—that the introduction of machinery, though it might give wealth to the capitalist class and to the country at large, brought with it for them