will be so; and the Stock Exchange people would not provide them with money, were they not convinced that Parliamentary Socialism is quite compatible with financial robbery.
B. Modern industry is characterised by an ever-growing care for exactitude; as tools get more scientific it is expected that the product shall have fewer hidden faults, and that in use its quality shall be as good as its appearance.
If Germany has not yet taken the place in the economic world which the mineral riches of its soil, the energy of its manufacturers and the science of its technicians ought to give it, it is because its manufacturers for a long time thought it clever to flood the markets with trash; although the quality of German manufactures has much improved during the last few years, it is not yet held in any very great esteem.
Here again it is possible to draw a comparison between industry in a high state of perfection and art. There have been periods in which the public appreciated above all the technical tricks by which the artist created an illusion of reality; but these tricks have never been accepted in the great schools, and they are universally condemned by the authors who are accepted as authorities in matters of art.[1]
This honesty which now seems to us to-day as necessary in industry as in art, was hardly suspected by the Utopists;[2] Fourier, at the beginning of the new era, believed that fraud in the quality of merchandise was characteristic
- ↑ See the chapter in Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture entitled "Lamp of Truth."
- ↑ It must not be forgotten that there are two ways of discussing art; Nietzsche attacks Kant for having "like all the philosophers meditated on art and the beautiful as a spectator instead of looking at the esthetic problem from the point of view of the artist, the creator" (op. cit. p. 178). In the time of the Utopists, esthetics was merely the babbling of amateurs, who were delighted with the cleverness with which the artist had been able to deceive the public.
