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Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook

you cannot put it into the blood. Unless your Art training enters into and links up the lives of those you would teach with a larger sense of citizenship, it isn't national. They won't carry it away with them into their daily pursuits, they won't make a spontaneous and instinctive application of it; they will only come to it at class-hours, and, when class-hours are over, quit again. I have spoken of the necessity of a standard of honour toward labour, but we need also a standard of honour toward life. It is still, you see, values—life-values—that I am trying to get at as a basis for Art.

Now to some of you I must have seemed, in all conscience, gloomy and pessimistic in my outlook on present conditions; and therefore, before I end, I will try to emit a ray of hope. There are certain social developments going on around us which make me hope that we may yet emerge from this valley of the shadows through which we are still stumbling. One is that there has been in the last generation a very general breakdown of the old artificial class notion of the kind of work which was compatible with "gentility." And one meets to-day people, whose culture has given them every chance to develop that standard of honour toward life (without which their claim to be gentry means nothing); you meet with many such people nowadays who have come back to manual labour in various forms, in farming, in horticulture, and in craftsmanship—some also, I am glad to say,