trade so that we may not have upon our hands an enormous increase of the unemployed problem. And as hands go begging, as we have more hands in the country than we can employ on useful and fit labour (fit, I mean, for such fine implements as these and for the brains behind them), therefore hands are inevitably put to degrading uses, and the joy goes out of work; and for the delight (or at least the intelligent patience) of true craftsmanship is substituted the soul-destroying bondage of mechanical labour at something which is not really worth producing.
You may take that, I think, as a test whether a State is in industrial health or disease—whether, namely, it tends more in the direction of setting labour free for other and higher purposes (through the permanent quality of its products), and so evolving an aristocracy of labour; or whether (owing to their ephemeral quality) it constantly tends to invent work of a lower and more trivial kind, and to provide jobs of an ephemeral character which are not really wanted.
Now bad and wasteful taste is directly productive, not so much of trade as of fluctuations in trade, because that sort of taste soon tires and asks for change; and the consequence is that thousands of workers (especially women, whose industries used to be home industries before machinery drew them out of the homes) are in this country constantly being thrown out of one useless employment into another, and very often have to pass through a fresh
