That will be a question for all men in that day when many wrongs are
righted, and when there will be no classes of degradation on whom
the dirty work of the world can be shovelled; and if men's minds are
still sick and loathe the arts, they will not be able to answer that
question.

Once men sat under grinding tyrannies, amidst violence and fear so
great, that nowadays we wonder how they lived through twenty-four
hours of it, till we remember that then, as now, their daily labour
was the main part of their lives, and that that daily labour was
sweetened by the daily creation of Art; and shall we who are
delivered from the evils they bore, live drearier days than they
did? Shall men, who have come forth from so many tyrannies, bind
themselves to yet another one, and become the slaves of nature,
piling day upon day of hopeless, useless toil? Must this go on
worsening till it comes to this at last--that the world shall have
come into its inheritance, and with all foes conquered and nought to
bind it, shall choose to sit down and labour for ever amidst grim
ugliness? How, then, were all our hopes cheated, what a gulf of
despair should we tumble into then?

In truth, it cannot be; yet if that sickness of repulsion to the
arts were to go on hopelessly, nought else would be, and the
extinction of the love of beauty and imagination would prove to be
the extinction of civilisation. But that sickness the world will
one day throw off, yet will, I believe, pass through many pains in
so doing, some of which will look very like the death-throes of Art,
and some, perhaps, will be grievous enough to the poor people of the
world; since hard necessity, I doubt, works many of the world's