Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/55

 house. It may be that this is inevitable, and that we have to make the best of it, but at any rate, I think it is only well to face the fact that some of our greatest teachers say that we can never hope to have beautiful houses and fitting homes so long as they are built, not by those who have to live in them, but by others, who perhaps have only some material or cash interest in them. Ruskin somewhere says, I think it is in "The Eagle's Nest,"—" If cottages are ever to be wisely built again, the peasant must enjoy his cottage and be himself its artist as a bird is. Shall cock-robins and yellow-hammers have wit enough to make themselves comfortable, and bullfinches pick a Gothic tracery out of decayed clematis, and your English (he might say your Welsh) yeoman be fitted by his landlord with four dead walls and a drain- pipe? Is this the result of your spending £300,000 a year at South Kensington in science and art? "

Without entering either into the question of the tenure of houses and lands in Wales, or into that most interesting question of the