Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/46

 words of, perhaps, the greatest witness to the need for domestic art and to the results, and to the beauty, and to the value of it to the national life, namely, William Morris. He said that the twofold office of domestic art is to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, and to give people pleasure in the things that they must perforce make.

Now, let us apply that definition or description of the office of decorative art to two simple things, to the building of a home and to our regard for a book. I will not go to—night outside these two things. I only take them as the two that are nearest to us, as the two that are necessary to us, and as the two that during life give us the greatest possible pleasure and joy; and I must admit, as I look round parts of Wales and parts of England, that we have very much to learn from the generations that have gone by. In our prosperity, our love of change, our tendency to follow the fashion of the day, we have one and all cleared off from Wales most of the memorials of what native art there was in