thought and attention, which they make and remake in the same
direction, and with a continuing desire to do as well as they can,
grows beautiful inevitably. Things made by mankind under modern
conditions are ugly, primarily because our social organisation is
ugly, because we live in an atmosphere of snatch and uncertainty,
and do everything in an underbred strenuous manner. This is the
misfortune of machinery, and not its fault. Art, like some beautiful
plant, lives on its atmosphere, and when the atmosphere is good, it
will grow everywhere, and when it is bad nowhere. If we smashed and
buried every machine, every furnace, every factory in the world, and
without any further change set ourselves to home industries, hand
labour, spade husbandry, sheep-folding and pig minding, we should
still do things in the same haste, and achieve nothing but
dirtiness, inconvenience, bad air, and another gaunt and gawky
reflection of our intellectual and moral disorder. We should mend
nothing.

But in Utopia a man who designs a tram road will be a cultivated
man, an artist craftsman; he will strive, as a good writer, or a
painter strives, to achieve the simplicity of perfection. He will
make his girders and rails and parts as gracious as that first
engineer, Nature, has made the stems of her plants and the joints
and gestures of her animals. To esteem him a sort of anti-artist, to
count every man who makes things with his unaided thumbs an artist,
and every man who uses machinery as a brute, is merely a passing
phase of human stupidity. This tram road beside us will be a triumph
of design. The idea will be so unfamiliar to us that for a time it
will not occur to us that it is a system of beautiful objects at
all. We shall admire its ingenious adaptation to the need of a
district that is buried half the year in snow, the hard bed below,