factories or workshops, should be pleasant, just as the fields where
our most necessary work is done are pleasant. Believe me there is
nothing in the world to prevent this being done, save the necessity
of making profits on all wares; in other words, the wares are
cheapened at the expense of people being forced to work in crowded,
unwholesome, squalid, noisy dens: that is to say, they are cheapened
at the expense of the workman's life.

Well, so much for my claims as to my NECESSARY work, my tribute to
the community. I believe people would find, as they advanced in
their capacity for carrying on social order, that life so lived was
much less expensive than we now can have any idea of; and that, after
a little, people would rather be anxious to seek work than to avoid
it; that our working hours would rather be merry parties of men and
maids, young men and old enjoying themselves over their work, than
the grumpy weariness it mostly is now. Then would come the time for
the new birth of art, so much talked of, so long deferred; people
could not help showing their mirth and pleasure in their work, and
would be always wishing to express it in a tangible and more or less
enduring form, and the workshop would once more be a school of art,
whose influence no one could escape from.

And, again, that word art leads me to my last claim, which is that
the material surroundings of my life should be pleasant, generous,
and beautiful; that I know is a large claim, but this I will say
about it, that if it cannot be satisfied, if every civilized
community cannot provide such surroundings for all its members, I do
not want the world to go on; it is a mere misery that man has ever
existed. I do not think it possible under the present circumstances
to speak too strongly on this point. I feel sure that the time will