Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/144

 decent, wholesome and tolerable, and to secure for every Welsh rural village, not alone its church and chapel and public day and evening school and communal council, but also its accessible gardens, allotments and common pastures, its institute comprising a club-room, a reading room, a library, and, where necessary, bedrooms for unmarried labourers, and its cottage hospital and corps of nurses. Ruskin, in the "Stones of Venice," writing in his heightened style, said that " the cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this—that we manufacture everything except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine or to form a single living spirit never enters into our estimate of advantages." Since those words were written, strenuous efforts have been made to brighten the life of cities. Much, very much remains to be done. John Stuart Mill used to stand up for Wordsworth because he helped to keep alive in human nature elements which utilitarians