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 https://archive.org/details/craftsmanshipincOOashb 
 
CRAFTSMANSHIP IN 
 COMPETITIVE INDUSTRY 
 

CRAFTSMANSHIP IN 
 COMPETITIVE INDUSTRY 
 
 BEING A RECORD OF THE WORKSHOPS 
 OF THE GUILD OF HANDICRAFT, 
 AND SOME DEDUCTIONS FROM THEIR 
 TWENTY-ONE YEARS’ EXPERIENCE. 
 
 By 
 
 C. R. ASHBEE, M.A., 
 
 Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects ; Member of the Art 
 Workers' Guild; Member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society ; 
 Hon. Member of the Vienna Secession , Cfc., dfc. 
 
u If you have an Idea , and it 
 
 is a good Idea , will 
 
 only stick to it, you will come 
 
 out all right in the end I 
 <_> 
 
 Cecil Rhodes. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Ch. I. The Arts and Crafts Movement and its 
 Ethical Purpose. 
 
 Ch. II. The General Problem of the Guild of 
 
 Ch. III. 
 
 Handicraft and what it has tried to do. 
 
 The Competition of Machinery and the 
 Competition of the Amateur. 
 
 Ch. IV. 
 
 The Problem in the Town. 
 
 Ch. V. 
 
 The Problem in the Country and the 
 Country Handicap. 
 
 Ch. VI. 
 
 Some views of outside Shareholders. 
 
 Ch. VII. 
 
 Limited Liability and Profit Sharing. 
 
 Ch, VIII. The four ways out. 
 
 Ch. IX. 
 
 The Essential need of Standard and its 
 Protection. 
 
 Ch. X. 
 
 On the Wider National Aspects of 
 Standard. 
 
 Ch. XI. 
 
 The Architect and the Crafts. 
 
 Ch. XII. 
 
 The Economic Status of the Craftsman 
 in the future. 
 
 Ch. XIII. Basic Capital and Personal Capital. 
 
 Ch. XIV. The Education Question and its bearing 
 upon English Craftsmanship. 
 
 Ch. XV. Arts and Crafts and Agriculture. 
 
 Ch. XVI. The future of the Guild of Handicraft 
 as a fact and as an idea. 
 
To those Members of the Guild 
 of Handicraft , who, whether 
 working in the Guild's Shops 
 or not , have decided to stick 
 to it and see it through. 
 
 c> 
 
Hammerman at work on the Pitch Bowl, illustrating a craft 
 revived at the end of the 19 th Century , and now being again 
 destroyed by unregulated machine competition. ( See p. 96 .) 
 
CHAPTER I. THE ARTS AND CRAFTS 
 MOVEMENT & ITS ETHICAL PURPOSE. 
 
 The Arts and Crafts movement began with the 
 object of making useful things, of making them 
 well and of making them beautiful ; goodness and 
 beauty were to the leaders of the movement 
 synonymous terms. 
 
 The attempt to carry through these principles has 
 brought those who have worked consistently at the 
 details of their crafts face to face with a series of 
 problems they never anticipated at the outset, and 
 has made them, in the course of the last 25 years, 
 shape for themselves a view of life which differs from 
 that generally held. This view may take now a 
 political, now a social, now, an aesthetic form ; it may 
 or may not be directly practicable, but it claims to 
 be based upon experience, and to have a definite 
 objective in modern English life and thought. 
 
 As far as an artist may have politics at all, I figure 
 the outlook in England to myself in the following 
 formula. Our political theories are determined 
 ultimately by the great economic factor of Industrial 
 machinery. It is this that has given us our great 
 cities, our colonial expansion, the fact of our 
 Imperialism, the theory of our Free Trade. Indus- 
 trial machinery is now finding its limitation, and 
 therefore a new political era is beginning. The 
 signs of this are in the three protests against the old 
 order, which have cut completely across the old lines 
 of thought. The first protest is Socialism which 
 says “ Look what a fearful mess the uncontrolled use 
 of Industrial machinery has made of our civilization, 
 we must start sweeping things up from below, and 
 
 5 
 
get rid of the curse of cheap labour.” The second 
 protest is Tariff Reform, which says “ The Free 
 Trade theory that sacrifices everything to provide 
 cheap food for our industrial centres, is out of date, 
 we must have a new fiscal system, so devised as to 
 give expression to that racial consciousness which our 
 Colonial expansion has brought about. The standard 
 of the English speaking people must be one standard.” 
 The third protest against the Industrial system is the 
 protest of the Arts and Crafts, the protest of the 
 individual, who says “ What is all this worth after 
 all, and where is it leading us ? Neither your 
 Socialism on the one hand, nor your expression of 
 racial consciousness on the other, is of any use unless 
 you determine what is right and what is wrong in 
 your industrial production, unless you say what ought 
 and what ought not to be made. Let Socialism 
 sweep up by all means, and let Fiscal Reform tie the 
 English people together and make their standard one, 
 but we, the Arts and Crafts, are here to determine 
 what Standard is, to show it you in product and 
 producer alike ; we are here to bring you back again 
 to the realities of life, to the use of the hand and the 
 brain, of which your Industrial machinery has 
 deprived over half your population.” 
 
 Thus it comes that those men whose names are 
 connected inseparably with the Arts and Crafts, 
 perhaps form part of that movement which is 
 discrediting conservative and liberal alike, which is 
 giving to the English cities a consciousness, and 
 making for the reform of Parliament ; the movement 
 by which a new ideal is shaping in national education, 
 an ideal higher than the petty sectarianism of the last 
 generation — the generation of the churches — and by 
 which technical schools are springing up all over the 
 country, and efforts are being made to get once more 
 6 
 
at the secret of the hand. It has many names, this 
 movement, and many helpers, but it is the same 
 movement by which men like Bishop Ingram and 
 Bishop Gore are seeking again to socialise the 
 Anglican Church, or by which the Fabian Society is 
 salting the English municipalities, by which Bernard 
 Shaw and Granville Barker are fighting for the 
 expression of ideas and a deeper moral sense in the 
 modern drama, by which Sidney Webb throws the 
 dry light of economic truth upon the facts of our 
 social environment, and some few of the more 
 intelligent landlords are silently setting to work trying 
 new methods upon their estates, simplifying their lives 
 and touching reality. It is an idealistic movement, 
 this of which they are part, and it is their function, 
 the function of the Arts and Crafts, to express it, to 
 be its plastic voice. 
 
 Through their workshops then, and the work of their 
 hands, have they been brought step by step into touch 
 with the great problems of English life, and arguing 
 from their experience they do not accept the views 
 usually taken by politicians and economists as to their 
 solution. Thus it is usually held as an axiom that 
 production on a large scale — through the factory 
 system — is more economical than small production — 
 the production of the hand or the domestic industry. 
 It is held that because this has been shown to apply 
 in competitive industry, that therefore it must be 
 true nationally, that because it has been shown under 
 a system of private enterprise how the hand and the 
 domestic industry has been extinguished by the 
 factory system, that therefore it must necessarily 
 apply also to the whole community, that the saving 
 must increase proportionately. The artists and the 
 craftsmen deny that this is so, and they think it can 
 be proved. 
 
 7 
 
Yet upon this assumption, viz., that what is economy 
 to the individual trader is, if pooled and taken over 
 by the State, also economy to the community, largely 
 rests the argument for Collectivism as laid down by 
 the Socialists. In my view, and arguing as I do from 
 the experience of a great number of small hand 
 workshops in town and country alike, there are very 
 many industries to which the collectivist theory 
 cannot be made to apply at all, there are others to 
 which if it be applied, the waste and loss to the 
 community in life, in physique, in human output is 
 vastly greater than the gain, and there are others yet 
 to which it not only does apply but in which it 
 admits of great extension. 
 
 I deduce from this in the first place that it is necessary 
 to distinguish between the different sorts of Industry. 
 That secondly we cannot study Industry individually 
 but must consider the bearing of the different 
 Industries upon life as a whole, and thirdly that 
 Industry itself and the life of our great towns, must 
 be readjusted to the agrarian question, the question of 
 the land, of how people are to live on it, of what are 
 the forms of labour best suited to it, and of how in 
 consequence the factory system with its machinery 
 for reduplicative production must be regulated and 
 controlled with a view to the land question, and the 
 standard of life and quality. 
 
 The vital consequence of this proposition is best set 
 forth in the form of a parallel — the parallel of slavery. 
 The wage-slave of to-day, may or may not be in a 
 better position than the bond-slave of classic times, or 
 the serf of the Middle Ages ; but the machinery 
 which he works, and the method in which he works 
 it, constitute a growing danger to the whole com- 
 munity. It is usually held that slavery, while it is 
 bad for the slaves, is worse for the slave-holders, 
 8 
 
because it demoralizes them, it makes them wasteful, 
 callous, helpless, they lose their grip upon the 
 realities of life. They grow indeed like the mysterious 
 rich person in the travels of Maundeville, beyond the 
 realms of Prester John, who was so rich that he had 
 to have his meat stuffed into him because he had lost 
 the use of his hands. That is much the position at 
 which we are in danger of arriving. Yet the danger 
 is not so great for the machines and their drivers, — 
 the people that do the meat stuffing, — as for the 
 whole Community, who, like the great rich person 
 beyond the realms of Prester John are losing the use 
 of their hands and getting more and more out of 
 touch with actual things. 
 
 The Arts and Crafts movement then assumes through 
 its contact with the realities of life, an ethical signi- 
 ficance of the greatest moment. It touches both 
 producer & consumer alike, & so it touches everybody. 
 It brings indeed into modern Industry a little of that 
 Soul, that imaginative quality in which our civiliza- 
 tion is so lacking. It reminds us that the imaginative 
 things are the real things, and it shows us that when 
 they are to be expressed in man’s handiwork, they 
 must come into immediate contact with material, 
 must touch actuality. 
 
 What I seek to show is that this Arts and Crafts 
 movement, which began with the earnestness of the 
 Pre-Raphaelite painters, the prophetic enthusiasm 
 of Ruskin and the titanic energy of Morris, is not 
 what the public has thought it to be, or is seeking to 
 make it : a nursery for luxuries, a hothouse for the 
 production of mere trivialities and useless things for 
 the rich. It is a movement for the stamping out of 
 such things by sound production on the one hand, & 
 the inevitable regulation of machine production and 
 cheap labour on the other. My thesis is that the 
 
 9 
 
expensive superfluity and the cheap superfluity 
 are one and the same thing , equally useless, equally 
 wasteful, & that both must be destroyed. The Arts 
 and Crafts movement then, if it means anything, 
 means Standard, whether of work or of life, the 
 protection of Standard, whether in the product or in 
 the producer, and it means that these two things must 
 be taken together. 
 
 To the men of this movement, who are seeking to 
 compass the destruction of the commercial system, to 
 discredit it, undermine it, overthrow it, their mission 
 is just as serious and just as sacred as was that of their 
 great grandfathers who first helped raise it into being, 
 and thought that they had built for it an abiding 
 monument in a crystal palace of glass & iron. They 
 want to put into the place of the old order that is 
 passing away, something finer, nobler, saner ; they 
 want to determine’ the limitations of the factory 
 system, to regulate machinery, to get back to realities 
 in labour and human life. 
 
 As for their own particular work, their buildings, 
 their furniture, their metal work, their pottery, 
 the things they make with their hands, they know 
 that they can do these things if the community will 
 only give them the opportunity. They want to be 
 allowed to do them, to do good work & useful work, 
 and in so doing live the decent quiet lives of good 
 citizens, they want to do this under conditions best 
 suited to the work they offer, and the children — the 
 young citizens they bring up. They are not in- 
 terested in the race for riches, they see something 
 better, on the other hand they do not see how their 
 work, — the work of the Arts and Crafts, — can be 
 practised with the constant haunting fear of the 
 workhouse for themselves and their families. The 
 work they have to do postulates time, thought, 
 10 
 
technical skill and experiment, they cannot do it “ to 
 date,” they often cannot do it “ to price.” They 
 consider that the mental vision of the Englishman has 
 been so deflected by the mechanical conditions of 
 modern life, that he unconsciously measures everything 
 by a machine standard, and there are certain things 
 that cannot be so measured. The Arts and Crafts 
 claim to be among such things, just as the coming of 
 seeds in the ground, the times and seasons of the year 
 and the changing of the character of youth. They 
 are of the fundamental necessities, they are among the 
 basic educational needs of the community, and the 
 community must find a place for them and give those 
 who practise them a stable economic basis. Some 
 of us indeed go further, and say that the proper place 
 for the Arts and Crafts is in the country, the place where 
 the children ought to be, in among the direct, ele- 
 mental facts of life, and , away from the complex, 
 artificial and often destructive influences of machinery 
 and the great town. Some of us would hold that 
 this in itself implies the need for regulating machinery 
 with a direct ethical objective. 
 
 For this reason, therefore, also most artists & craftsmen 
 would join issue with the more materialistic tendencies 
 of Socialism, and say that these are sometimes even 
 intensifying and developing the evils that must be 
 fought against, and they hold that a politico-economic 
 theory that sees in a supreme development of the 
 factory system and its perfect regulation, the solution 
 to all the difficulties of modern life is not sufficient. 
 They demand more than this. Speaking from the 
 experience of their workshops, and the work of their 
 hands they do not believe that such a theory, growing 
 as it has out of the industrial system, the system of 
 machinery, can possibly be final. They admit that 
 it may apply to a large part of the factory organiza- 
 
tion throughout the country, perhaps to the majority 
 of human occupations, but they maintain that those 
 who practise in the Arts and Crafts never are and 
 never can be of that organization. In so far, there- 
 fore, as the working theory of Socialism is based upon 
 and serves the need of the factory system as a whole, 
 it must and always will exclude them, and in that 
 sense they cannot be Socialists. 
 
 They perhaps go further and claim that when the 
 work that they do is put to comparison with the 
 work of the factory system, their work is better and 
 more serviceable to the community than the work 
 produced under the factory system ; they observe 
 that the two cannot co-exist, and they claim that 
 theirs being more vital to the community, the other 
 should be checked and regulated, not in their own 
 but in the community’s interest. This claim is made 
 not from any aesthetic reasons, for they do not take 
 their stand upon aesthetics, but from reasons human 
 and ethical, and that have to do with national 
 character and life. 
 
 The working theory of Socialism does on the other 
 hand appeal to many of them very strongly in its 
 bearing on all those basic needs of modern life, the 
 needs which may be said to be common to Industry 
 as a whole, and which tend to limit competition from 
 below. The clearing away of slums, the better 
 regulation of workshops, the strengthening and 
 consolidating of the trade union principle, the 
 doctrine of the minimum wage, old age pensions, 
 the regulation of markets, closer intercourse between 
 England and her Colonies, and the reform of the 
 English land system, all these things which are^part 
 of the programme of the working Socialist, or of the 
 social reformer, they many of them welcome, because 
 they believe that they will make their little work- 
 12 
 
shops and their existence as citizens, more possible. 
 The fact that to obtain these things it may be 
 necessary to interfere with the rights of private 
 property or curtail privilege does not much concern 
 them. They merely say, “ That must find itself, we 
 also not only have a right to live, our life is part of 
 the community’s need, its higher need, and these 
 things are necessary to our life.” 
 
 On the other hand, again, they do not disguise from 
 themselves the fact that in the near future there is a 
 risk of their means of livelihood being taken from 
 them by the loss of their patronage. They have 
 been dependent largely upon the support of the well- 
 to-do ; if they are to be treated as luxuries they 
 would by any heavy taxation of the well-to-do be 
 themselves cut off, and the person they love most in 
 all the world to work for, is the old country gentle- 
 man, the representative of traditional culture, who 
 still in his treatment of them throws in a touch of 
 18th-century courtesy, a quality of feudal sympathy 
 and patronage. Whether they repair for him a 
 church, or build for him a house, he is the patron 
 they most appreciate and with whom they are most 
 at one. But the coming change is obvious, they find 
 that the old country gentleman is passing away, he 
 lets his house to another who knows not Joseph. 
 His land is being portioned out for game preserves, 
 he is interested no longer in the Arts and Crafts of 
 the district, or they have drifted away, he now buys 
 machine products in the town. If society is making 
 of the artists and the crastsmen a marginal thing, is 
 it not doing this of him also. The marginal things 
 may in hard times have to go, and in so far as the artists 
 and the craftsmen minister merely to the trimmings 
 and frillings of communal life they may themselves 
 be cut off ; perhaps it is better that they should. 
 
 13 
 
Those masters of craftsmanship, however, who look more 
 deeply into the purpose of the Arts and Crafts and 
 the conditions of modern Industry in which they are 
 fulfilling themselves, know that their purpose is useful 
 public service, and that if this purpose be temporarily 
 obscured, it will be made clear again ; that their 
 purpose fundamentally is utility and utility of the best. 
 Their mission is to establish Standard ; to determine 
 the right and the wrong in commodities, to say 
 which of them are better produced by the hand than 
 by the machine, to say which are the things where 
 individuality is a prime factor, which are the things 
 best made for their own sake, which best develop 
 character and invention in the maker. 
 
 But the coming change is obvious and perhaps in the 
 coming change the craftsman will seek employment 
 from the municipality instead of the cultured country 
 gentleman. That is what my socialist friends think, 
 & they appear to think the craftsman will be as well 
 off under King Stork as under King Log ; I think it 
 doubtful. There is little sign as yet that the leaders 
 of Socialist opinion have given any thought to the 
 principles underlying craftsmanship, and they have 
 therefore not thought it needful to find any place for 
 the craftsman in their state. This is due to the fact that 
 they approach these matters from the outside as quasi 
 scientific problems, or from the point of view of 
 machine production, and do not touch them directly 
 as does the Craftsman with his workshop experience. 
 It is therefore very difficult for them to understand 
 his point of view. 
 
 One of the objects of this book, in which this point 
 of view is set forth, is to get the craftsman himself to 
 see it ; for then he is not'only more likely to combine 
 with his fellow craftsmen, and thus bring practical 
 pressure to bear upon those who are to shape the new 
 14 
 
State, but he will more readily realize his own 
 position in the coming change. The approaching 
 economic revolution in England will largely take the 
 form of a struggle between the Cities and the Parlia- 
 ment, the cities which represent Democracy, & which 
 are trying to get control of their own economic 
 environment, and Parliament which represents privi- 
 lege, privilege as expressed in land, capital, and the 
 control of the means of production. In this struggle 
 there seems little room for the craftsman, and so it 
 behoves him to carve out a way for himself. I am in 
 hopes that some of the experiences and some of the 
 suggestions in this book will help him towards doing 
 this. 
 
 In so far then as the justification of the Arts & Crafts 
 is the Standard they set, the real want they fulfil, in 
 so far must the craftsmen themselves come to be more 
 real and more direct in their hold on life, the men & 
 women who practise craftsmanship must not be de- 
 pendent on their craftsmanship alone. They must be 
 ready to take a hand at the elemental processes of life, 
 work on the land, cooking and baking, husbandry, the 
 things ot the house, the more direct things that show 
 what it is well to have and what it is better to do 
 without, all those things that imply a simpler living 
 of life. The townsman of the future will I think 
 largely live out in the country, and he will have to do 
 more with his hands than he does now, perhaps he will 
 bring with him what he has learnt in the town. But 
 to perfect and fulfil the life of Civic democracy, the 
 lesson of the great town, we must go beyond it, we 
 must learn the lesson of the country also, the Arts & 
 Crafts must go “ back to the land,” they must in part 
 at least be self supporting. While on the one hand 
 they must obtain a control over their own market, & 
 by collective action establish a limitation of machine 
 
 15 
 
production, they must on the other hand become self 
 dependent, at least in part, by a return to the direct 
 processes of husbandry, a return to the land. The 
 Arts and Crafts and the problem of the land 
 in England , are complementary to each other . 
 What I have endeavoured to set forth in this book is 
 the practical effort of a body of English craftsmen, 
 who aided by a little group of capitalists, have taken 
 their labour, their skill and their traditions with them, 
 packed up their kit and gone off into the country to 
 labour. How far they have succeeded or failed it is 
 not for me to say. The deductions I make are from 
 their experience, and indeed anything I may say is of 
 value only in so far as their experience has tested it. 
 If it can be shown that they have succeeded in certain 
 directions, it means that others shall succeed also and 
 go further ; if they have failed it means nothing 
 more than that for the time being the right way has 
 not yet been found, and that others will find it. 
 
 16 
 
CHAPTER II. THE GENERAL PROBLEM 
 OF THE GUILD OF HANDICRAFT AND 
 WHAT IT HAS TRIED TO DO. 
 
 The story of the Guild of Handicraft at the close of 
 20 years of life, or as some will prefer to put it, at 
 the commencement of its majority and a new phase 
 of its development, may be summed in a sentence. 
 It has temporarily ruined itself in an attempt to 
 uphold Standard and humanize work ; and to show, 
 in other words, that standard of workmanship and 
 standard of life must be taken together and that the 
 one is dependent upon the other. 
 
 The wise, hard, shrewd business man will no doubt 
 say — indeed I have heard him say — “ I told you so.” 
 But that scarce suffices as prophecy, and it lacks 
 definiteness. I propose in the following pages to 
 show that the business man is wrong ; that* his 
 prediction is only partially true, that a great many 
 things have happened in the 20 years, that were 
 undreamed of by him or us, at the outset ; that 
 rapidly changing economic conditions have affected 
 the whole problem of the Guild of Handicraft and 
 the Arts and Crafts movement of which it is an 
 expression ; and that apart from its artistic product, in 
 building, furnishing, silver, jewels & books, which we 
 are here not called upon to judge, these being workshop 
 matters and matters for the future, the Guild of 
 Handicraft has arrived at certain social and economic 
 results, which may claim to be of real value towards 
 national life and towards those aspirations of labour 
 and craftsmanship which will in the future largely 
 help shape national life. 
 
 B 
 
 17 
 
When we say that the Guild has ruined itself, we 
 mean that as far as its legal position as a limited 
 liability company is concerned it has gone as far as 
 it can go in that direction, and that this chapter in 
 its history ends at the close of the year 1907. The 
 condition of limited liability has been an episode in 
 the Guild’s life, and the principles for which the 
 Guild stands, will now have to develop in some 
 other way in order to find their fulfilment. In plain 
 business terms the Guild had dropped at the beginning 
 of its twenty-first year and at the end of a period of 
 acute commercial depression, a substantial sum of 
 money, upwards of £6,000 — £7,000, the money of 
 its shareholders, many of whom are the workmen 
 themselves, in the attempt to carry through certain 
 principles of workmanship and life. 
 
 These principles may be briefly resumed. There 
 should be under some collective grouping, a number 
 of workmen practising different crafts, carrying out 
 as far as possible their own designs, coming into 
 direct contact with material, and so organised as to 
 make it possible for the workmen to be wherever 
 necessary in direct touch with the consumer. 
 
 The crafts were mainly those that had to do with 
 Architecture and they were mainly handicrafts, that 
 is to say machinery was not repudiated, but the idea 
 was that in those cases where the hand was better 
 used it should be used, and that the customer was 
 not to be put off with the machine-made article on 
 the score of cheapness, neatness or trade finish. 
 Thus a timber plank, it was held, could be sawn by 
 the circular saw (see p. 19), but should not be subse- 
 quently carved by machinery. A silver plate could 
 be rolled by the mill, but the actual dish or cup 
 should not be subsequently spun in the chuck (see 
 p. 21). In this we considered, and still do, that there 
 
B 2 
 
 l 9 
 
 Circular Saw in the Guild' s Po7ver House , illustrating the right use of 
 
lies a vital question of principle, affecting the whole 
 future of the industries concerned, the life of the 
 men engaged in them, and the arts and crafts which 
 can and should grow out of them for the . greater 
 honour and beauty of national life. 
 
 In addition to these principles of right and wrong 
 in craftsmanship and the use and abuse of machinery, 
 the Guild went further. It laid down, and has 
 consistently applied the principle, that the men 
 themselves should hold shares and have an interest 
 and stake in the concern, that personal interest must 
 affect product, especially such product as has an 
 intrinsic personal quality, and that through the men’s 
 appointed labour director they should have a voice 
 in the management & policy of the business. It was 
 even hoped at one time that the business might 
 ultimately belong entirely to the men themselves. 
 Finally, as the outcome of these principles, it was 
 felt that for the sake of the work and the life growing 
 out of it, some better conditions than those prevalent 
 in a great city like London, or Birmingham, with 
 their horrible workshop associations and the dreary 
 confinement of their grey streets & houses, should be 
 given a chance ; and for this the move of the whole 
 concern into the country — with some i 50 men, women 
 and children — was effected in the year 1902. For 
 this move there were needed three things : enthusiasm, 
 skill and money. The first two we had in abundance, 
 the third we borrowed. The Table of Curves that I 
 give in Appendix I. shows that in the year 1.90 1 
 when we increased our share capital and borrowed of 
 our bankers in order to establish our new workshops 
 in the country, the business was developing rapidly, 
 the London West End shop in Brook Street was 
 doing well, the sales were increasing, the business 
 had for 1 5 years paid 5 per cent, upon its invested 
 20 
 
Hammered Silver Cup of which llie parts are “ raised ” by ha>id 
 out of the sheet , and not spun by machinery upon a “ chuck 
 
capital and there was every prospect of a continuance 
 of work and prosperity. 
 
 If we follow the line of curves, however, from the 
 year of our going into the country, in 1902, what do 
 we see ? The working expenses line goes up, the 
 line of stock goes up, and, though the line of sales 
 goes up also, it goes very slowly and in no relation to 
 the other two, while in the year 1905 it is stationary 
 and in the year 1906 it drops disastrously. 
 
 Another thing, however, was also happening as a result 
 partly of the Country move, partly of the decrease of 
 purchasing power in the Guild’s clientele, which the 
 curves do not express. The sales though stationary in 
 quantity decreased in value. That is, the work they 
 represent has not been work of such good quality, or 
 work on which such high profit was made. A great 
 deal of it indeed was work in trifles, little work, and 
 work of which we were not particularly proud. I 
 wish to draw a distinction here because, as I shall 
 show later the real standard of excellence, the quality 
 of our work, the skill of our workpeople, has been 
 raised by going into the country, but the public has 
 simultaneously demanded of them a great deal of cheap 
 indifferent work that they would prefer not to have 
 made. Where in the years 1 900-1 some of the 
 Guild’s customers spent say £50 in the year with 
 it, they in the years 1906-7 spent only £5 or £10 ; 
 they perhaps still asked for “ individual things,” but 
 they asked for a cheaper article. I say that this was 
 partly due to our move into the country, because we 
 did not in the country feel justified in refusing the 
 cheaper work, it took the place of making stock, it 
 was often more profitable, and the turnover was 
 immediate. Had we been working in the town we 
 should, as I shall show presently, have been able to 
 refuse it. 
 
 22 
 
In view of these facts and the changing economic 
 conditions with which the Guild was faced, the course 
 taken by the directors of the Company was indeed the 
 only one open to them. They were Trustees of the 
 Capital committed to their charge, and the share- 
 holders, of whom a large proportion were the workmen 
 themselves, were necessarily their first consideration. 
 At the close of the year 1906 they encountered a 
 heavy loss, £2,000, with a drop in their sales on a 
 turnover of >£1 0,000. They tried to meet this boldly 
 by cutting down expenses and writing down the value of 
 the shares 50 per cent, in order to meet the depreciation 
 of stock that had taken place, and by an appeal to the 
 shareholders for a further £1,000 fresh capital. The 
 writing down was agreed to, but only >£600 of the 
 >£1,000 asked for was subscribed. The >£400 balance 
 could no doubt have been found had there been any 
 prospects of its return in the near future, but the sales 
 in 1907 dropped further, it was impossible to reduce 
 expenses on the one hand, or to make fresh stock on 
 the other. The glut of commodities on the market 
 and the decline in purchasing power of the customers 
 showed too unmistakably that the existing stock, 
 (some >£7,000 worth) would have to be still further 
 written down, i.e., far below the cost of production, 
 if it were to have any chance of sale, or if it were to 
 have a market price at all. 
 
 We tested this in several ways, but an illustration taken 
 from two of the Guild’s shops, the metal shop and the 
 smithy, will best show what I mean and how our 
 experience worked out. The Guild had for many 
 years made Electric Lights of various shapes and forms, 
 the workmen for the most part designing and develop- 
 ing these themselves, but the stock had been growing 
 in excess of the sale and the directors stopped the 
 making. In the year 1906 they valued the stock, 
 
 23 
 
writing it down on their booksat 75 per cent, below the 
 cost of labour and material. At this figure they 
 thought they were safe, but in 1907 they determined 
 to test the actual market value at an auction of electric 
 light fittings, and selling them without reserve, they 
 realized them at a further 50 per cent, reduction. So 
 that an Electric Light (see p. 2 5) which had cost £5 to 
 make in labour and material, & for which the customer 
 would normally pay about £7, had, four years after 
 making, an actual market value of 1 2/6. The position 
 was not very different with many other of the Guild’s 
 products ; their value being principally labour they 
 turned out to be quite unsalable except at what Mr. 
 Premium would call “ frightful reductions.” 
 
 Thus the whole question of the continuity of the 
 Guild as a limited company had to be faced, for the 
 issue before it turned upon the value of craftsmanship, 
 upon the market value of the commodities offered for 
 sale, upon the value in the market of the workmen of 
 whom the business was composed, and upon the 
 value of their capacity, skill, intelligence, tradition, 
 and power to make more things if required. 
 
 “ If you cannot sell your things,” says the financier, 
 “ your things are worth nothing ” if you cannot sell 
 your skill, your skill is worth nothing then he adds 
 in a rider — “ of course there is a wrecking price — are 
 you prepared to take that — how long can you wait ? 
 how long will your bankers and your shareholders 
 wait ? As for your workmen and their traditions, & 
 their standard of life — that is not a question of 
 practical finance and is no concern of mine — let them 
 find their own market individually ! ” 
 
 That, without any reference to ethics is the way in 
 which any financier must under modern industrial 
 conditions look at any business, and if he finds that 
 the wrecking price must be accepted he proceeds to 
 -4 
 
/ 
 
 The Electric Light Fitting used in illustration of 
 the arbitrary reduction of labour values. 
 
 25 
 
wreck accordingly. Not with any evil heart or un- 
 charitableness, but simply as part of a system, and 
 through the ordinary processes of liquidation, voluntary 
 or otherwise. In short he finds the artistic business, 
 the business of Craftsmanship, of high standard & all 
 that workshop Tradition implies, to have, at certain 
 periods, no value in the market at all ; and therefore 
 if he is wise he leaves it alone, or buys it at the 
 wrecking figure as the case may be. 
 
 Now the Guild’s shareholders as will be seen in the 
 sequel, are the most charming and enlightened share- 
 holders in England, so are the Guild’s bankers ; but no 
 amount of courtesy, chivalry, taste, kindness or long- 
 suffering can immediately affect the working of 
 economic conditions ; it does affect them in the long 
 run as I shall hope to show, but immediately these 
 conditions are all powerful. To its shareholders then 
 the Guild had to say, “this business of yours and ours 
 cannot permanently be conducted in the manner in 
 which we have for the last ten years been trying to 
 conduct it.” 
 
 I will now give some of the practical reasons why 
 this has been found to be so. To begin with then, the 
 business of the Guild of Handicraft has not been one 
 business but eight distinct businesses, each involving 
 special technical knowledge and skill. “ Art,” 
 Michael Angelo said, “ is only one,” and the genuine 
 artist, the fine craftsman, can see it in no other way, 
 but the modern business man can have none of this ; 
 he specializes. He says “ the fact that you have a 
 number of craftsmen working at different trades, 
 learning from and inspired by the excellence of each 
 others occupations is a deterrent rather than an aid to 
 business — I have to concentrate — it is only by con- 
 centration that profits can be made ! ” 
 
 Then this carrying on of eight different businesses, 
 26 
 
though they have played into each others hands, has 
 involved a great deal of secretarial work ; more 
 secretarial work and charges than each business indi- 
 vidually would have needed if conducted on the same 
 scale as a small private venture. 
 
 In the next place the conditions of limited liability 
 have been proved to be exceptionally costly when 
 applied to an organisation like that of the Guild. 
 The necessity for keeping books and accounts in perfect 
 order, the intricate detail of the men’s holdings 
 and their weekly calculation and adjustment, 
 practically necessitated a special clerk and book-keeper. 
 The conduct of a large concern through limited 
 liability may be simple enough, the carrying out of the 
 principle of the labour directorate and the men’s 
 holdings as laid down in our Articles of Association 
 might in a large concern entail no very great extra 
 cost, but when applied to , eight small concerns the 
 burden of extra secretarial work at £ 200 or £300 a 
 year is considerable. 
 
 It is not sufficiently observed, I think, how the com- 
 plexity of modern business methods is coming in itself 
 to be more and more a tax upon labour. While 
 valuing at its true worth the ignorant workman’s 
 criticism that the dead expenses are a burden to 
 business, there is no doubt that a larger proportion of 
 the product than is healthy or wise is often absorbed 
 by what the workmen call the “ black coats.” 
 Economic conditions at present necessitate this, but it 
 does not alter the fact that 40 per cent, or more is a very 
 high figure to pay for what might be called expenses of 
 notation, for marketing, for seeing how one was getting 
 on and for the privilege of being allowed to work. 
 Thus we ourselves have found that the conditions of 
 limited liability and all it involves have made us 
 continually employ much costly labour of secretaries 
 
 27 
 
and foremen in “ taking stock.” Too much taking of 
 stock grows to be an expensive luxury. 
 
 There has then been the problem of profit sharing, 
 and the labour directorate, both these have been of 
 the very greatest help towards the fundamental 
 needs of the workshop, the standard of work and life, 
 and for winning the interest of the men ; but they 
 have sometimes tended to impede the manager, 
 where swift responsible action was needed. To put 
 it quite plainly, management by business methods 
 means that your manager shall be in a position to 
 sack the whole staff at a week’s notice if he thinks 
 right ; management with the co-operation of labour 
 means that there is a check upon him. The greater 
 security of labour, however, is purchased at the cost 
 of a weakening of the management. In businesses 
 where the market is secure, management with the 
 co-operation of labour works very well, but when 
 rapid change and adaptation to market conditions are 
 needed it leads to difficulties. 
 
 Finally there has been the move into the country 
 and all that it has entailed. The initial cost of the 
 move and the preparation of the new workshops, the 
 difficulty of country housing which took three years 
 for its adjustment, the difficulty of carriage and high 
 railway rates, the difficulty of buying in large instead 
 of small quantities without accumulating too great a 
 surplus stock of raw material in all the different 
 businesses, the difficulty of country education which 
 was rar behind the standard required by London 
 workpeople, the difficulty of how to maintain 
 standard while working for stock, and lastly the 
 difficulty of keeping hold of the Guild’s market in 
 the face of a growing competition, and in an acute 
 period of industrial depression: all these things had 
 in one way or another to be grappled with. 
 
 28 
 
In fine it has not been this or that problem, or the 
 fight for this or that principle that has destroyed the 
 Guild as constituted up to the close of the year 1907, 
 but the complexity and variety of the difficulties with 
 which it has had to deal simultaneously. It has 
 stood so far and continues to stand for a right 
 method in Industry. If, under competitive conditions 
 the right cannot be found, 'Other conditions must be 
 created in which it can. That will remain the 
 Guild’s problem in. the future as in the past. 
 
 29 
 
CHAPTER III. THE COMPETITION OF 
 MACHINERY AND THE COMPETITION 
 OF THE AMATEUR. 
 
 The Guild then represents in petto the relationship 
 of some eight different workshops, and of the skilled 
 craftsmen that compose them, to Industry as a whole. 
 What are the principle forms of competition against 
 which it has to contend ? They are primarily two : 
 the competition of machinery and the competition of 
 amateur work. Both these forms are unfair. 
 
 It will be observed that I am not considering as 
 unfair competition the pitting of the products of one 
 good shop against another ; the products of fair 
 wages, clean life and sound conditions may rightly 
 challenge comparison one with the other. If A. can 
 make his work as well as B., if both have been judged 
 by the same standard, if the work of both be offered to 
 the customer in the same market, his choice becomes a 
 matter of taste, or some moral quality in the work of 
 the one shop as against the other may give it a superior 
 excellence. Such competition is fair competition 
 because it is in moral qualities or turns upon aesthetic 
 choice, it stimulates further and finer production ; but 
 any competition by which the man is undersold by the 
 machine, or by which one of the producers undersells 
 the other because he has other means of subsistence is 
 unfair competition. 
 
 Now I do not wish it to be supposed that I want in 
 any way to have an embargo put upon the invention 
 of new machinery. The Luddites in the i 8th Century 
 broke up the Spinning Jenny, and the makers of wigs 
 in the reign of George III. petitioned parliament to 
 to stop people wearing their own hair, because it 
 30 
 
interfered with their handicrafts. Both efforts were 
 futile. But I do wish to see the province of the hand 
 work and the province of the machine work so defined, 
 that the former when it is demonstrably better in its 
 direct product and its human resultant than the latter, 
 shall not continue to be at the latter’s mercy. I wish 
 further to see, and I hope shall succeed in showing 
 the need of, such workshop regulation as shall make 
 the competition between the hand and the machine 
 impossible or at least negligable ; and I wish finally 
 also to see some internal arrangement of the crafts by 
 which a check shall be put upon the unfair com- 
 petition of the amateur. I do not want to stop him 
 producing, I merely want to stop him accepting an 
 unfair price for his work, a price that destroys the 
 lives of others. 
 
 It may be argued that there is nothing new in this, 
 that competition between the hand and the machine 
 has been going on ever since the beginning of the 
 Industrial revolution, if not before, that the hand has 
 almost always been beaten by the machine. While 
 the other sort of competition, that between the 
 skilled craftsman and the amateur goes back to the 
 beginning of time. All this is quite true ; but the 
 difference* and the answer to the argument, lie in 
 the altered modern economic conditions. 
 
 Whether it be the competition of the one or the 
 other, we have come to a time when it is possible 
 and expedient to control them, when it is possible for 
 the production of the amateur to be limited in respect 
 of sale, and for Industrial machinery which has now 
 been so highly developed in many directions to be 
 given an extended usefulness on the one hand, and to 
 be curtailed in its mischief and waste on the other. 
 Let us examine first the competition of the machine 
 and see how it bears upon the Arts and Crafts. We 
 
 3 i 
 
have had in this country 150 years of machine 
 development, we know that the machine has come to 
 stay, we know its value, we also now are beginning 
 to know its limitations, we know that it has revolu- 
 tionized every craft practised by man, and we know 
 that though it has, like all revolutions, brought much 
 sorrow with it, its power is a beneficent power. Just 
 as the institution of slavery was a beneficent insti- 
 tution by comparison with the savage Tribal 
 extermination which it superseded, just as the insti- 
 tution of feudal serfdom under the mediaeval Church 
 was a further advance upon the buying and selling of 
 men which slavery implied, so the institution of 
 machinery — the Industrial system as it is called — is 
 beneficent by comparison with the mediaeval system 
 under which the serf was “ adscriptus glebae.” Each 
 system gradually evolved out of beneficence into 
 abuse, & devised methods within itself for regulating 
 and checking its abuses. 
 
 Now when we come to think of it one of the most 
 extraordinary phenomena of the end of the 19th 
 Century has been the revival, in almost every depart- 
 ment of life, of handwork — the Arts and Crafts. 
 Why, it might not unreasonably be asked, if 
 machinery has once and for all come and destroyed 
 the organisation of the old hand workshops, why are 
 they all suddenly being revived ? What does it 
 mean ? Why do we see again hand weavers, hand 
 printers, hand silversmiths, hand book-binders, why 
 have a hundred and one different crafts, in metal, in 
 wood, in iron, in textiles, in pottery, in leather, in 
 glass, in stone, suddenly thrown aside mechanical aids 
 and started again from the very beginning ? Is it 
 nothing but a stupid anachronism ? All these anti- 
 quated mediaeval methods that we thought were 
 decently dead and buried with the extinction of the 
 32 
 
Guilds of Craft, why are they suddenly all coming 
 to life again ? 
 
 The answer is that the Industrial system has found 
 its limitation, has got as far as it can go ; the per- 
 sonal, the human factor has reappeared, and the 
 movement of the Arts and Crafts which has grown 
 out of Industrialism is a rebellion of the individual 
 against its abuse. 
 
 One of the directors of the Guild of Handicraft, Ltd., 
 when it was decided to wind up the Company, gave 
 it as his opinion that the sum of £ 2,000 spent purely 
 in advertisement over a period of two years would 
 have brought and might still bring the business round. 
 The £ 2,000 was not there and so the question was 
 an academic one, but I doubt whether the view he 
 took was right. The difficulty lies deeper. It might 
 have re-made the business, but I do not think the 
 £ 2,000 would ever have come back. I think, too, 
 that something else would have happened. The 
 business if re-made would have been another business 
 — a business dependent not on handicraft but on re- 
 duplication. And it is here that we touch the central 
 point as between the hand and the machine. Elimi- 
 nating the factor of time, it ought often to be possible 
 to produce a piece of handicraft at the same price as 
 a piece of machine stuff of similar pattern, but as soon 
 as you take it to market the conditions are changed, and 
 it costs you about 50 per cent, more to market the piece 
 of hand work than the piece of machine stuff. It is 
 exceedingly difficult to get the customer to see the 
 reason of this, but the business man acquainted with 
 the intricacies of buying, selling and production grasps 
 it at once. 
 
 The crux of the situation in terms of business is that 
 whereas every machine-made article shares its dead 
 expenses with a thousand of its fellows, the pro- 
 
 33 
 
portion of dead expense or establishment charge is of 
 necessity very much higher on hand-made goods, 
 where each article is specially designed to meet the 
 particular requirements of its purchaser. Hence the 
 gross profit on a piece of hand work has to be corre- 
 spondingly greater, while that of a piece of machine 
 stuff may be infinitesimally small, and yet the result 
 in net profit on the two may be in inverse ratio, that 
 is to say the hand-piece may be produced at 20 
 per cent, to 30 per cent, gross profit and sold at a 
 net loss, while the machine piece may be produced 
 at a 1 o per cent, gross profit and sold at a net 
 profit, the profit and loss in either case being calcu- 
 lated over the whole workings of the business. As 
 a further consequence the machine business grows 
 greater and stronger with each piece sold, while the 
 hand business remains stationary or comes to an end. 
 This was graphically brought home to me once when 
 going over the works of the Gorham Manufacturing 
 Co., in Rhode Island, the greatest silver-smithing 
 house in America. The manager by way of com- 
 paring the petty methods of the Guild of Handicraft 
 with the splendid achievements of Providence, R.I., 
 took me into one of his immense workrooms, a room 
 devoted to polishing. There were some 200 fellows 
 in long red brown rows, each in front of a red brown 
 wheel, they were all dressed in red brown smocks, 
 they were covered with red brown dust, they were all 
 polishing tea-pots. “ My good Sir,” said the manager 
 to me with humorous patronage, “ While you’re 
 niggling at one little tea-pot I turn two hundred out 
 at a bang.” It was perfectly true, and yet I knew 
 that in the matter of tea-pots my way was the right 
 way and the way of Providence wrong. 
 
 When we pursue the question further and introduce 
 the element of time, which for the sake of argument 
 34 
 
we eliminated before, we are met with a fresh series 
 of factors, all of which economically aid and cheapen 
 the machine product, while they hinder and make 
 dearer the hand product. These are locomotion, 
 questions of export and import, the extra cost of 
 material purchased in small as against large quantities, 
 and the question of the turnover of capital invested. 
 The Arts and Crafts and the products of Industry while 
 they constantly impinge upon each other and must 
 be studied in their relation to one another, are like 
 two trains running side by side, but of which the 
 “ Slow ” gets in to its destination first because the 
 station happens to be the next along the line. If the 
 “ Slow ” moreover goes to a pleasant little wayside 
 country station, and the “ Fast ” only goes to the 
 terminus in the great town, and you happen to want 
 to go to the little wayside station, the “ Fast ” is of 
 no earthly use to you. Everything indeed points to 
 the need of regulating machinery on behalf of the 
 Arts and Crafts, of differentiating between what 
 ought and what ought not to be made by the hand 
 or by the machine, and of once again introducing 
 into our commodities those ethical considerations 
 which we have so long ruled out, because we could 
 not see how they should be applied. We want to 
 get again to the little wayside station in the country, 
 we don’t all want to rush to the terminus in the 
 great town. 
 
 Now let us examine the other form of competition, 
 that of the amateur. It may seem paradoxical, but 
 the amateur who has fastened like a leech upon the 
 Arts and Crafts movement, is the direct outcome of 
 the Industrial system. He is the person of leisure 
 who practises the Arts and Crafts because he has not 
 got to make his living put of them. He is sup- 
 ported by the unearned increment of the Industrial 
 
 55 
 
system. In a certain sense he is a healthy and 
 honest outcome of the teaching of Ruskin when he 
 advised people again to make things with their 
 hands, to ornament them for their own pleasure, and 
 to delight once more in their own labour. I have 
 great sympathy with the amateur. Much more, my 
 skilled workmen tell me, than I ought to have ! 
 Ever since the beginning of the Guild it has been the 
 tradition of the Guild workshops to allow amateurs 
 to come in upon payment, in order to work at the 
 bench under the supervision of one or other of the 
 craftsmen. Not counting the many hundreds of 
 schoolmasters and others who worked in the old 
 School of Handicraft at Essex House,* we have 
 trained or had at the Guild benches some ioo 
 amateur workers, ladies, school masters, technical 
 teachers, clerks and miscellaneous people who wanted 
 in one way or another to work with their hands. 
 These people worked with us for varying periods of 
 from one month to a year, and though they have 
 often grumbled at the price they have had to pay, 
 they none of them regretted in the end what they 
 got for it. This grumbling at the price charged 
 (usually about jTi a week) is the result of that 
 persistent undervaluing of human labour in which, 
 owing to machine conditions we, especially the more 
 educated and academic portion of the community, 
 have all been brought up. We cannot understand 
 how £i a week can be a fair charge, and yet when 
 we measure it in rent, fire, light, food and clothing, 
 when we consider that the skilled craftsman’s wage 
 runs at JT 2 10s., and that by our presence as trouble- 
 some learners we are taking up half his week’s time, 
 
 * See my “ Endeavour in the teachings of John Ruskin and 
 Witt iam Morris. ” ( 1901 .) 
 
 36 
 
and constantly asking what are to him insufferably 
 silly questions, is it so unreasonable ? The amateur 
 does not in fact realize the latent value of that which 
 the skilled craftsman can give him. 
 
 Until the formation of the Campden School of Arts 
 and Crafts under the Gloucester County Council, of 
 which I shall say something in Chapter XIV, amateurs 
 continued to be trained in the Guild workshops ; 
 then it was found to be a mutual advantage to pass 
 on the amateur students to the little technical school 
 across the road, the committee of the school making 
 their own arrangements with the Guild’s craftsmen. 
 Now I do not think that the Guild has experienced 
 any serious direct competition at the hands of 
 amateurs who have worked in its shops. Some of 
 our workmen differ from me on this point, but I 
 always reply “ Even if it be so, we could not have 
 helped it ; had they not learnt of us they would have 
 learned elsewhere ; the movement is for learning and 
 appreciating craftsmanship, the honour of the hand, 
 we may as well be ahead of the movement as behind 
 it.” 
 
 But there is no doubt that collectively the output of 
 the amateur, which is in the bulk an output of very 
 second-rate work, has been great, and it has absorbed 
 a large part of the skilled craftsman’s market in 
 several directions. 
 
 In the Guild’s workshops our fellows are rightly 
 nervous of this competition of the amateur, especially 
 the lady amateur, and albeit with the utmost con- 
 sideration they speak of her generically as “ dear 
 Emily.” I have seen a great deal of her work in the 
 last ten years, she is very versatile, she makes jewellery, 
 she binds books, she enamels, she carves, she does 
 leather work, a hundred different graceful and delicate 
 crafts. She is very modest and does not profess to 
 
 37 
 
any high standard, nor does she compete in any lines 
 of work where physique or great experience are 
 desired, but she is perpetually tingling to sell her 
 work before she half knows how to make it, and she 
 does compete because her name is legion and because, 
 being supported by her parents she is prepared to sell 
 her labour for 2d. an hour, where the skilled work- 
 man has to sell his for is. in order to keep up 
 standard and support his family. 
 
 I could keep an album of letters from Society ladies 
 who have written to me from time to time about 
 “ dear Emily,” what she can do, and how clever she 
 is, and whether I could let her come and work for a 
 month in the Guild’s workshops, say in the summer 
 when there is no hunting or dancing ; they ask me 
 how soon she will be able to earn her little pin money, 
 or they ask would the Guild even pay her at once if 
 they have an opening, and so forth. It is difficult to 
 see how this is to be stopped, especially as there is so 
 much that is good in “ dear Emily.” But it must be 
 stopped somehow, and I have endeavoured in 
 Chapter VII. to suggest some ways by which at least 
 it may be regulated. We craftsmen in the details of 
 our workshops and from the experience of our labour 
 have watched these two forms of competition, the 
 competition of the machine and the competition of 
 the amateur, we have noted the way they are 
 strangling the crafts and wasting human life, and we 
 know these two forms of competition to be unfair. 
 
 38 
 
CHAPTER IV. THE PROBLEM IN THE 
 TOWN. 
 
 Now in the great town even this unfair competition 
 can be faced, but experience has shown us that in the 
 country the situation for the present at least is different. 
 With the latter I shall deal directly ; the reason of the 
 former is first to be considered. 
 
 As long as the Guild was in London it could stand up 
 against depressions of trade by virtue of the good will 
 and enthusiasm of its members — once more the human 
 factor Also it was able to protect itself in respect of 
 standard because there was no need to do any but good 
 work. We experienced during our 15 years in 
 London two such depressions, and our method of 
 meeting them was simple: We first worked short 
 
 time, then our men stood down, usually by seniority. 
 Being men of high skill and well known in their Trade 
 Unions and the ordinary commercial shops, they had 
 no difficulty in getting inferior work elsewhere ; 
 being fond of their own shop and liking the spirit in 
 which it was conducted, proud also of the work it 
 turned out, they quietly came back again when trade 
 revived. 1 can remember a time when half the 
 benches at Essex House in Mile End were standing 
 idle, and yet the whole organization was instinct with 
 life & we continued to pay 5 per cent, on our capital. 
 “ Standing down ” in London therefore did not mean 
 starvation to the workman, it did not imply the risk 
 of uprooting home and family in the search for work 
 at a distance, and it did not mean loss to capital. 
 
 It may be asked, then why was this not foreseen 
 before the country move was undertaken ? Perhaps 
 the best answer to this is a reference once again to the 
 
 39 
 
curves in Appendix I. The upward tendency of the 
 whole business was so marked, the purchase of the 
 Guild’s goods so steady, the presumption that the stock 
 would continue to be marketable so fair, that there 
 seemed every reason to hope for continuity. But it 
 is questionable how far even in town the serious 
 Industrial depression of the last three years, the deluge 
 of cheap production, & the uncontrolled competition 
 of the machine and the amateur would not have cut 
 into and largely destroyed our market and affected the 
 stability of the Guild’s business. 
 
 All the other workers in the Arts and Crafts tell the 
 same story, and it is noticeable that many of them in 
 the last year or so have gone under, or have closed 
 their workshops. They have discovered, in short, 
 what we have discovered, that the Arts and Crafts 
 have at present in modern Industry no stable economic 
 basis. My own view in the matter is that staying in 
 town we should probably have pulled things through 
 though with great loss to our shareholders ; but by 
 going into the country we have done a still better 
 thing and one which, if we carry our little ship off 
 the rocks in the manner to be indicated in my later 
 chapters, we shall never regret, and which may be an 
 examp’e to many who are working on lines similar to 
 ours. We claim then that we solved the problem 
 of how to conduct our little Arts and Crafts in the 
 town, and to conduct them as we did ; with the 
 interest and co-operation of our workpeople. But 
 then we had the market at our doors, we actually did 
 our work in the market place, and it was possible in 
 the larger whole to form as we formed, a little society 
 of our own, taking advantage of industrial conditions 
 when compelled to, throwing them aside when they 
 were no longer needed. In this fact I find my first 
 convincing retort to the business man’s ct I told you so !” 
 40 
 
It will be evident however to the most superficial 
 observer that the condition of any Arts and Crafts 
 business if it seeks to stand on its own merits alone, 
 must, under modern competitive conditions, be 
 precarious. Even in the great town — that hot-house 
 of exotics — its condition will remain an artificial one. 
 And yet perhaps no more artificial than any of the 
 great Industrial undertakings which depend not upon 
 the real or permanent needs of the Community, but 
 upon needs which are forced upon it by artificial or 
 insecure conditions — soap for instance, the demand for 
 which rests largely upon soot, and the filth of our 
 great cities ; or corrugated iron, the demand for 
 which is a result of the general insecurity and un- 
 willingness to use permanent building materials. 
 
 In the town we had not only the market at the door, 
 we could draw from the best East London schools for 
 our young apprentices, and from the best shops for our 
 skilled workmen, we could watch closely the work of 
 our colleagues and competitors, we had the South 
 Kensington Museum as a source of inspiration, and 
 we had trains and ’buses to take us there. We also 
 had trains to take us out of the town for week ends, 
 and the little country cottages we set up first at South 
 Benfleet in Essex, then at Ruislip in Middlesex, Long 
 Crendon in Buckinghamshire, and Drayton-St.- 
 Leonards in Oxfordshire, helped no little to unite our 
 people and give us the right taste for the country. 
 
 I seem to see in the prevalent fashion of the week- 
 end cottage the beginning of that decentralization of 
 industry which is to destroy the great town. Not a 
 few of the little Arts and Crafts in this way have 
 gone into the country, and perhaps in this way may 
 come our second retort to the business man’s “ I told 
 you so ! ” 
 
 We felt indeed long before the move was made that 
 
 4i 
 
to do our work of Arts and Crafts well we must get 
 out into the country. For two years before the 
 expiry of our lease at Essex House, we searched in 
 the great town to see whether we could find there a 
 suitable place for our new workshops. We tried 
 Mile End and Bow, South Benfleet and the eastern 
 districts, we tried Fulham & Chelsea and Putney and 
 Brompton, we went north & tried Ruislip and Harrow. 
 None of these for one reason or another seemed 
 good enough, until we went right out into the little 
 forgotten Cotswold town of the Age of Arts and 
 Crafts where industrialism had never touched, where 
 there was an old silk mill and empty cottages ready 
 to hand, left almost as when the Arts and Crafts 
 ended in the i 8th century. Perhaps this historical — 
 or is it sociological — expression of English life may yet 
 give us the key to their development in the future. 
 The very fact, however, that the week-end stimulus 
 is needed, that the museum and the technical school 
 are not enough, that somehow we cannot do without 
 country air and that all these other aids to life are 
 required to make it possible for the Arts and Crafts 
 to prosper in the great city, shows how artificial their 
 whole condition is, and how we must ultimately look 
 for some other basis upon which to set them if we 
 wish them to be secure. What these may be I shall 
 examine in later chapters. Here I wish to state my 
 conviction that though in the great town they may 
 for the time being be economically possible, they 
 cannot there under modern conditions have any 
 abiding home. Those of us who have for many 
 years lived and worked in the eastern quarters of the 
 great city, know only too well that for national 
 character, for constructive purpose, for stable creation, 
 something better is needed than the environment of 
 an “ East End,” whether it be on the south side of 
 42 
 
43 
 
 Chipping Campden High Street . 
 
the Thames or the north, whether it be in Birming- 
 ham or in Sheffield, in Wolverhampton or in 
 Glasgow, in Pittsburg or in Chicago. I have had 
 i 5 years of it in the worst parts of London, and so 
 perhaps know. My experience indeed has been full 
 of happiness, largely due no doubt, as it is with 
 others, to persistently shutting my eyes ; but, much 
 as I like the East London cockney, his vivacity, his 
 imaginative romance, his effervescent humour, his 
 loyalty and affection, and the quality in him that is 
 perpetually driving nervously for something new ; 
 much as I love him for these things, the great town 
 which engenders him deprives him also of other 
 qualities that are needful for the work I would see 
 him do. Repose, margin, leisure, reserve, restraint, 
 and colour in life, these other things are also wanted 
 for the Arts and Crafts, and these other things are 
 better found in country surroundings where there are 
 green fields, and trees and beauty, where there is 
 chance for good physical development, where there is 
 no soot, no oppressive ugliness, and no daily nervous 
 racket of locomotion to and from work. 
 
 When therefore we put ourselves the question — 
 when I put myself the question in the light of the 
 last six years’ experience in the country — was the 
 thing worth permanently doing in the town, and 
 would you for the sake of economic success have 
 continued it or start it again, I answer, No. The 
 thing was not worth permanently doing in the town, 
 what we gained in economic success we paid for in 
 the human something that has given to the best of 
 our later productions their quality, and to our work- 
 men their character. Also we have gained by what 
 we have done a certain finer outlook into life that has 
 influenced all of us and our work. It would be 
 comparatively easy with the experience of 20 years 
 44 
 
behind us to go back to London and start it all again 
 — a new Guild of Handicraft in East London or 
 elsewhere, many of its old members would return to 
 it even there, but many would not, because they have 
 seen how things can be better done ; and some of us 
 feel with Socrates that having once seen the Sun and 
 learned the meaning of the shadows on the wall, we 
 have no desire to go back into the den. True, Plato 
 made some of his people return in order to teach 
 those that w.ere still chained, but in modern times 
 there are other ways of doing this, and one of these 
 ways, when the necessary experience has been 
 gathered is to write a book, and reason with the den 
 dwellers about their blindness. 
 
 45 
 
CHAPTER V. THE PROBLEM IN THE 
 COUNTRY & THE COUNTRY HANDICAP. 
 
 In my “ Endeavour in the Teachings of John Ruskin 
 and William Morris,” published in 1901, of which 
 book the present is a continuation, I outlined the 
 possibility of a move into the country and what we 
 might hope from it. In the light of our later 
 experience, the following quotation from the 
 “ Endeavour ” may not be misplaced. 
 
 “ Perhaps some day, some English landlord who has watched from 
 his point of view the economic evil that has driven his people into 
 the towns, has seen his farms dying away, and his small tenantry 
 and labourers gradually dispersed, may hold out the hand to us, and 
 make it possible for us to carry out our works in combination with 
 some form of agriculture by small holdings, market gardening or co- 
 operative farming. For we indeed realize from our side, the economic 
 evils of the town. I believe this can be done if tried on a sufficiently 
 comprehensive and yet a sufficiently unpretending scale. The 
 experience of my friend Edward Carpenter and others who have 
 attacked the problem from a simple, direct and human point of view, 
 has gone to show that this is quite possible, if two things are borne in 
 mind. First, if some other occupation besides agriculture alone be 
 carried on, and second, if the bulk of the produce reared be retained 
 for the consumption of the dwellers on the land themselves.” 
 
 Six years is perhaps hardly time enough to test an 
 experiment of this kind, especially if, instead of 
 working on a large scale and with the assistance of 
 any such imaginative landlord as is indicated above, 
 our experiment has had to be tried on a very small 
 scale with very little money, all of it borrowed, and on 
 land that was very costly. But in so far as we have 
 been able to try it my anticipations have come true. 
 It has been possible for some of our workmen to live 
 practically rent free by the produce of their little 
 holdings, varying from ^ an acre downwards. One 
 
of them made for me a calculation of the amount of 
 stuff he could grow on his plot of 1-3 6th of an acre, 
 and compared it with the price he paid for vegetables 
 for his family of four people in the town, it worked 
 out at a cash saving of 3s. a week. As his rent in the 
 country was 4s. a week and his rent in town 7s. 6d. 
 exclusive of fares, he made a further saving there. 
 The point to be observed is that his own labour was 
 marginal, and he got in return for it the direct produce 
 of the soil, unhandled and untaxed by middle men, in 
 other words not having to market, he had not to pay 
 tribute to the consumer in town. Some 12 of our 
 London workmen & their families availed themselves 
 of the opportunities gradually offered of small garden 
 plots, or allotments, and I think none of them have 
 regretted it. My hope is that later on this principle, 
 so sound in itself, of helping the craft, may be 
 developed in such a way as to be not merely a help 
 but a mainstay for Craftsmanship. Of this however 
 I shall speak later in Chapter XIII. and Chapter XIV. 
 My purpose in this Chapter is rather to point to the 
 difficulties and handicaps that have so far made the 
 carrying on of the Guild’s business in the country 
 impossible. The slowness of everything, the absence 
 of up-to-date appliances, such as the telephone, the 
 difficultv of railway rates and carriage and the un- 
 willingness of the Railway Companies to depart one 
 fraction from the usage of 50 years ago, their system 
 being based upon the hypothesis that the town and 
 not the country is the objective, all these things and 
 many others have hampered us, but they have done 
 something else, too, they have tended to put the 
 business and the workmen more and more into each 
 others hands. The workmen have become indispens- 
 able to the business, and the business to the workmen. 
 This in itself or from the point of view of the Guild 
 
 47 
 
as a human organism is an excellent thing, but under 
 economic pressure, in a period of bad times it is 
 doubly disastrous. 
 
 I could show an instance of where a big contract 
 of many hundred pounds was lost owing to the refusal 
 of the Railway Company to make any reduction in 
 its carriage rate. I could show another of where 
 the Guild workmen — London workmen — have been 
 ruled out of London County Council contracts which 
 they had hitherto been able to take, because their 
 shop was now no longer in London. I mention 
 these here as examples of what seem to me to be 
 perfectly remediable handicaps to country industries, 
 and as illustrations of how we encourage the move- 
 ment of workmen into our great cities instead of 
 the reverse. 
 
 I am not sure that the greatest handicap of all to the 
 doing of work in the country “ efficiently,” or shall 
 we say “competitively,” is not just the essential 
 country quality or mood that we all most admire, & 
 that we each individually aim to achieve as soon as 
 occasion offers ; a certain leisure, a certain largeness, 
 a delaying, a dilettantism perhaps, a comfortable com- 
 prehension of things, it is difficult to know what to 
 call it, its influence is so subtle, but it is this something 
 that makes life good, that makes labour good when it 
 is conscientiously done, but that also makes it 
 expensive. 
 
 I would like to develop this idea because it seems to 
 me to bear closely not only upon the Arts & Crafts, 
 when pursued in the country, but also upon the 
 dwellers in the country themselves. Whatever one 
 may call it, this country mood seems to have affected 
 very largely the attitude of people in the country 
 towards the Guild’s workmen, and it has certainly 
 reacted upon them. Our experience has been that 
 4 8 
 
we have received the greatest kindness, hospitality & 
 courtesy from all ranks and from every quarter, but 
 practical support — none. The whole thing has been 
 regarded as play from beginning to end. Nothing 
 so strikes the townsman when he settles in the country 
 as the apparent unwillingness of people in the country 
 to try any experiment themselves or allow others to 
 try it. The townsman sees in their attitude a want 
 of seriousness — an apathy. 
 
 Yet this attitude of theirs is not unnatural when we 
 come to think of it, for life in the country is a very 
 pleasant life, and people do not want to be disturbed. 
 They take Lord Melbourne’s view — “ Can’t you let 
 it alone ! ” But it is the town — the great town — 
 the industrial centre now as ever that stirs the puddle, 
 and that says: “ We will not let it alone, we cannot 
 let it alone ! ” Indeed it is in the town, where 70 
 per cent, of the population of England dwells, that 
 the real menace to the life in the country lies — the 
 quick, active, disintegrating thought that is driving 
 the townsman towards Social Democracy. 
 
 If it were only possible to get the fine old Conser- 
 vative, the agriculturist, the aristocrat to put himself 
 a little into the attitude of mind of the townsman, 
 to see why there is this overpowering need for con- 
 structive social reform. If, for instance, it could be 
 made incumbent upon every peer, or every Member 
 of Parliament to live, without servants, for a month 
 every year in let us say White Horse Lane, Stepney, 
 or Flowery Dean Street, Whitechapel, we might 
 arrive at a saner legislative point of view. Perhaps the 
 wiping out of the Conservative Party in the Election 
 of 1906, which was due to their blind incapacity to 
 appreciate the real needs of the democracy & what it 
 was feeling and thinking, may lead to some con- 
 structive change ; but there are many who believe, 
 
 49 
 
 D 
 
5 ° 
 
 Derelict Cottages in Campden High Street. 
 
5i 
 
 D2 
 
 The same reconstructed as one house. 
 
certainly most of the workmen I have had to do 
 with in my life, that the Liberal Party will have to 
 be similarly wiped out, before such change shall be. 
 And what after all is the country as distinct from the 
 town ? Who are they that stand for it ? I do not 
 refer to the few kindly old-fashioned people who for 
 generations have looked after their estates and still 
 live on them, they are the signal exceptions upon 
 whom the whole life of the countryside really turns ; 
 but outside them society in the country consists for 
 the most part of amiable, idle people, interested in 
 their horses and their motor cars and spending their 
 lives in passing from one social function to another. 
 They are merely hedonists, pleasure seekers, they will 
 be charming to you as long as you succeed, and they 
 will take no further note of your existence if you 
 fail. They recognise no public obligations ; and as 
 their only function besides living pleasantly is to 
 record votes in favour of the protection of rights of 
 private property, for which in return they recognise 
 few equivalent duties, they are a real danger to the 
 State. Their life in short is parasitic ; they are not 
 part of the real working life of the countryside, and 
 they are almost necessarily out of sympathy with 
 any genuine attempt, such as the Guild’s has been, 
 for bringing fresh life into it, or finding useful and 
 healthful livelihood for the many boys and girls whom 
 a little place like Campden, for instance, turns out 
 every year and sends to the great town there to learn 
 the lessons of Social Democracy. 
 
 As for the exceptions, they are so pre-eminent when 
 we meet them, that they are always unmistakable and 
 we find them in every grade of life. Occasionally a 
 landlord who devotes his whole energy to the 
 realities — not the show — of public service ; some- 
 times, but very rarely, a parish priest or a dissenting 
 52 
 
minister, sometimes a farmer, a little local tradesman, 
 craftsman or labourer, whose character tells construc- 
 tively upon the social life around him. These are 
 the real people of the countryside, it is they who do 
 the work ; the majority of the well to do are 
 amiable and idle, and the rest apathetic. If we go 
 into the houses of these amiable and idle people, 
 what do we find ? The question is not irrelevant, 
 because it goes to the root of craftsmanship. We 
 find rooms stuffed full of every conceivable com- 
 modity, for the most part tastelessly and ignorantly 
 gathered together. We find almost everything the 
 product of machinery, we find that these people 
 whose idleness and wealth at least should warrant 
 taste, are the destroyers of taste. Perhaps they have 
 observed the prevalent fashion of buying old things, 
 or things that look as if they were old, in which 
 case this has helped to stimulate and build up a 
 the growing industrial prosperity of centres like 
 High Wycombe, where a special study is made of 
 the fashion for antiquity, and where the Chippendale 
 and Sheraton frets hang in rows along the factory walls, 
 and the antique chairs and settees are turned out in 
 hundreds to the hum of the latest American 
 machinery. 
 
 Against all this, the machinery on the one hand, the 
 antiquity on the other, and last the immense inpour- 
 ing of cheap foreign commodities which flow into the 
 world’s free trade market, the English craftsman has 
 to fight, to make a livelihood, & keep up the standard 
 of life and the standard of workmanship. 
 
 It is this that is driving him into the town. There 
 he can do it, as I have pointed out, because there he 
 can grade his own labour, and has his Union behind 
 him, and when the good shop is slack, he can go to 
 the cheaper shop for a while ; but the handicap in the 
 
54 
 
 Derelict Cottages in Campden High Street. 
 
55 
 
 The same reconstructed as one house . 
 
country is all but insuperable. I say all but insuper- 
 able because in Chapter XV. I shall show the direction 
 in which I think hope lies for little country industries. 
 Whether the amiable idle people will block the way, 
 not from any ill will, but from sheer idleness or 
 inability to understand, remains to be seen. Indeed 
 it is for their point of view in life that the English 
 working craftsman has to pay — the “ partridge and 
 water colour point of view” — the point of view by 
 which their sons are taught to shoot partridges and 
 their daughters to be as the polished corners of the 
 temple, i.e. % paint water colours, make photographs, 
 do enamels and look charming. 
 
 For our part we had no cause to complain. The 
 powers that be, though they had no money to spend 
 with us, patted us benevolently on the back ; and the 
 bulk of the village we had with us, not unnaturally 
 so, for we paid a wages bill of from £5,000 to 
 £6,000 a year, all of which was spent in the place, 
 and we employed a good deal of local labour. But still 
 it is no use shutting ones eyes to the handicaps, or 
 pretending they are not there. Other venturers from 
 the great towns will meet the same difficulties, and 
 they may as well profit from our experience. Beside 
 those to which I have already referred, any group of 
 townsmen settling in the country will immediately be 
 faced with further difficulties in housing, sanitation, 
 education and amusement. 
 
 Let us take first the question of health. One of the 
 standing difficulties is the insanitary cottage. It is 
 practically impossible to get insanitary cottages 
 condemned, because the official whose duty it is to do 
 this, is appointed by the body whose members are 
 owners of the insanitary cottages. To condemn them 
 is sometimes as much as his place is worth, and it 
 becomes a question of the interference with the sacred 
 56 
 
57 
 
 of New Cottages built for Guild Craftsmen. 
 
rights of private property. The appointment of the 
 medical inspector should be made by some central 
 authority, and his livelihood should not depend upon 
 his local popularity — a readjustment of the law would 
 save us much diphtheria and typhoid in the villages. 
 There should be no vested interests in diphtheria and 
 typhoid. 
 
 We were practically unable to get insanitary cottages 
 condemned, our only way was to buy or lease, and 
 then reconstruct them ourselves, and the pictures I 
 give on pp. 50, 51, 54 and 55, show some of these 
 reconstructed cottages in which the attempt was 
 made, as will be seen, to keep the local amenities and 
 at the same time provide the sanitary requisites. I 
 wish to make it clear that all this was a great tax 
 upon our resources, and militated against the success 
 of our experiment. We laid out among ourselves 
 collectively, and independent of the capital of the 
 business some £3,000 in the problem of sanitary 
 housing. On p. 57 and p. 59 I give examples of new 
 cottages with gardens which I built, and which I 
 offer as a type of what a decent craftsman’s cottage 
 in the country should be ; each cottage has from a 
 quarter to half-an-acre of land. 
 
 The difficulty in the way of education was a greater 
 one even than that of health. In the country the 
 question of education is one of politics. We have 
 been nearly six years in the district now, but we have 
 so far been carefully and jealously kept off all boards 
 of managers and governors. The petty politics and 
 the petty sectarianism, it is much the same thing, 
 which rules in these matters, is of infinitely more 
 importance locally than education itself, and the only 
 way to be put on any of these boards is to take definite 
 sides politically. As a Conservative one would be 
 offered a seat at once, as a Radical one would be 
 58 
 
59 
 
 group of four new Cottages built for Guildsmen a?id others . 
 
offered a seat to keep the other side quiet, as an 
 Educationalist one has no locus standi upon a board 
 whose function is education. Not being able to 
 work through the boards, the next best way to get 
 things done was to exercise pressure from outside. 
 So we started on entirely fresh lines by forming a 
 Higher Education School of our own. This school 
 has now become one of the local representative insti- 
 tutions, and is doing excellent work. I shall have 
 more to say of it in Chapter XIV., where I deal 
 specifically with education in the Crafts. 
 
 Before leaving the question of education, however, I 
 would like to give another instance of country 
 handicaps. The doing of good work for us necessi- 
 tated our drawing upon young skilled workmen from 
 the towns, the country labour not being sufficiently 
 educated, and naturally we drew from the best schools. 
 In this way we got young scholarship holders from 
 the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, and 
 the School of Art in Birmingham. The young 
 craftsmen were only too glad to get into a good shop 
 in the country under healthy and happy conditions, 
 and asked if they could have their scholarships 
 transferred to the Campden School of Arts and Crafts 
 which was recognised by the Board of Education. 
 But it was no use, they were tied by the leg to 
 the great town, & told by the London & Birmingham 
 officials that if they did not return they would forfeit 
 their scholarships. Once again an example this of 
 how men are dragged back into the town by force 
 majeure , and how life in the country is by foolish 
 and short-sighted regulations made for them as difficult 
 as possible. In Chapter XIV. I offer some construc- 
 tive suggestions as to how this may be overcome. 
 
 The last of the country handicaps to which I wish to 
 point is the absence of amusement, of sport. Sport 
 60 
 
Act 3 , Scene 5 . 
 
 “ Hark yoct, here’s none but lads of inetllef lives of a hundred 
 years and upwards ; care never drunk their blood, nor want 
 made them warble : ‘ Heigh-ho , my heart is heavy . ’ ” 
 
 61 
 
 Scene from Beaumont & Fletcher s “ Knight of the Burning Pestle f as performed by the 
 Guild in the Town Hall , at Camp den. 
 
in the country is confined to the privileged classes. 
 As the population decays and the countryside starves 
 out, the village cricket match and all it stands for 
 becomes more and more of a rarity, and in any case 
 the labourers’ lads cannot afford the dressing up, the 
 flannels and blazers and things ; often too there is no 
 land for them to play on, except at, for them, 
 prohibitive rentals. We found this to be so. Sport, 
 indeed, one of the greatest of all humanizing influences, 
 depends largely for its success upon the solidarity it 
 brings with it. In a decaying countryside it is just 
 this solidarity which is absent. The gathering of a 
 number of townsmen into the country brought us 
 face to face with this question, and our six years has 
 proved to us one thing finally and absolutely. It has 
 shown us the falseness of the common cuckoo cry 
 that the townsman loves the music halls and the gas 
 lamps. He does nothing of the sort ; he hates them 
 if he can get something better or more genuine. I 
 studied this question very carefully, and during these 
 years have learned to distinguish between good and 
 bad recreation. Roughly I find it to be of two kinds, 
 recreation that is a part of life, and recreation that is 
 apart from life ; the first is as much to be commended 
 as the latter is to be condemned. The artificial 
 pleasures of the rich, and the loafiing of the East End 
 wastrel, the spoilt workman, are both apart from life, 
 both bad. Indeed the loafer — not the man of 
 leisure, but the loafer — whether you meet him inside 
 a country house, or outside a public house, is equally 
 despicable ; both are vicious, and it is the duty of the 
 community to stamp them out. The growth of 
 poverty increases the public house loafer, the growth 
 of riches increases the country house loafer. 
 
 It is a most suggestive thing to compare in the 
 countryside where the Guild is settled, the great 
 62 
 
63 
 
 Summer Sports in Campden Bathing Lake. 
 
tradition of popular sport known as the Cotswold 
 games, that found its fullest expression in the days of 
 Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and that lasted until the 
 enclosure of the Common lands in the middle of the 
 19th century, with the condition of the popular sports 
 at the end of the century. Riding, hunting, coursing, 
 running, wrestling, leaping, bar spurning, boxing, 
 quarter staff, dancing, singing and music, with in- 
 numerable forms of healthy exercise for men & women 
 were practised by all ranks and classes. There was a 
 fellowship, a leisure shown in these sports, craftsman- 
 ship, and costume, and colour were a part of them, 
 badges and prizes were distributed, we have records 
 of communal festivals intimately associated with the 
 conditions of communal agriculture, and evidencing a 
 fine solidarity in the life of the countryside ; but in a 
 short 50 years the whole of this is swept away and at 
 the close of the century the countryside sports are 
 reduced to a stray cricket club or so in which the 
 casual labourers have no part, & the periodic visitations 
 of gentlemanly shooters and riders who come into the 
 district from God knows where, for the luxury of 
 expensive sport. 
 
 We sought when settling in the country to give our 
 fellows a variety of different forms of sport, simple for 
 the most part, but such as would make again for the 
 solidarity of life, and fit in with the different seasons 
 of the year, and they were not slow to avail themselves 
 of it. In the three pictures I show on pp. 61, 63 & 
 65, respectively, a scene from Beaumont & Fletcher 
 play, the result of the evening study of the winter 
 months as acted in the Town Hall of Campden, the 
 summer sports at the bathing lake which was made a 
 year after we came to Campden, where the trophies & 
 cups to the best swimmers are being competed for, & 
 the lads in their school garden. They had opportu- 
 
 64 
 
K 
 
 65 
 
 Gardening Class at the Campden School of j. I ris and Crafts. 
 
nities too for football, hockey, cricket ; and the 
 foreman of the Guild woodshop, built up a fine hand, 
 recruited from townsmen and countrymen alike, which 
 gives regular recitals, and through the medium of 
 which much genuine music is homing once again in 
 the village. 
 
 What we wanted — but did not get — from our friends & 
 neighbours in the country was a little of the country- 
 man’s experience in country matters such as should 
 enable the townsman to have another string to his 
 bow, and be in the end not unprofitable to the 
 countryman either. I think we shall get it later, 
 hut these things, like most things in the country, come 
 slowly. There is a story told in a Hertfordshire 
 village, of some London country holiday children, 
 sharp as needles, with white cheeks and sparkling 
 eves, who were boarded out for a week with the 
 cottagers. The London boys hung over the bridge 
 watching the country lads fish. They had never seen 
 the operation of fishing before, and so for three days 
 they followed the process with intense interest ; on the 
 fourth day they showed signs of restlessness ; on the 
 fifth they began to mock their Hertfordshire cousins, 
 and at the end of the week were teaching them how 
 to do it better. It is less in the thought of doing it 
 better, than of doing it in some way that shall make 
 the work I want to do possible, — some form of 
 agriculture that shall be contributory to the Arts and 
 Crafts, — that I offer this parable. It has a double 
 edge, for to my thinking the country can teach and 
 help us even more than the town. But this leads me 
 to a portion of my subject that I shall develop in 
 Chapter XV.* and so for the present I leave it. 
 Ever since John Ruskin’s early days, people have been 
 trying to solve the problem which the Middle Ages 
 solved, of doing good craftsmanship in the country ; 
 
 66 
 
6 ? 
 E 2 
 
 The Chipping Campden Band. 
 
for us so far the problem has been insoluble, because 
 as yet it is not possible for the working craftsman to 
 live, and the countryside in which he might live is 
 becoming more and more the preserve of the leisured 
 classes. 
 
CHAPTER VI. SOME VIEWS OF OUTSIDE 
 SHAREHOLDERS. 
 
 In the appendix I give a series of letters written 
 during the year 1907 by different outside or non- 
 Guildsman shareholders in response to one of mine, 
 also given, which throw light upon the problems we 
 are dealing with. These letters are necessarily 
 anonymous, but they are many of them by men who 
 occupy high official positions, who have to do with 
 great business undertakings, or whose names are 
 well-known. 
 
 The views expressed may in great part be taken as 
 those of the absentee capitalist who is sympathetic 
 with the objects the Guild has in view, who is usually 
 a man of taste, and who may even be willing, for the 
 sake of taste and the encouragement of good pro- 
 duction, himself to lose money. What does their 
 collective opinion imply ? 
 
 If my shareholder friends — and I think I may say 
 that all of the writers are personal friends of mine — 
 will forgive me the impertinence, I will now deal 
 with the several points raised in their letters some- 
 what as one might deal with examination papers. 
 Not, I trust, in any too donnish manner, but simply as 
 being in a position better able to judge than any of 
 the writers the value of the individual view held. 
 
 I take the letters in the order of their arrangement. 
 In letters No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, the straightforward 
 commercial point of view is held without any beating 
 about the bush. “ The business don’t pay, the 
 business must be shut up, there’s an end on’t.” This 
 does not take us very far. For it is equivalent to 
 
 69 
 
saying our problem of Arts and Crafts in the Country 
 under healthy conditions is economically insoluble. 
 Therefore, unless we are prepared to come back to the 
 great Town and do it there as best we may, we must 
 give it up. Well, that is a perfectly straightforward 
 point of view, and it is the point of view that would 
 normally be held by Capital when regarded quite 
 unethically. The purpose of this book is largely to 
 point out ways in which the difficulty can and will 
 be got over. The purely business shareholder conse- 
 quently does not help us much because he is not 
 ready to go beyond the initial experiment — he will 
 not make more than the first move in the game. Not 
 that this is altogether fair in regard to Shareholder 
 No. 3. “ Frankly he always doubted,” but still he 
 
 is willing to help, if only perhaps in the manner of 
 the benevolent power in Tennyson’s Tithonus, who did 
 “ Grant our asking with a smile, Like wealthy men 
 who care not when they give.” 
 
 Shareholders No. 4, No. 5, No. 6, No. 7 and No. 8, 
 qualify the business point of view with a touch of 
 philanthropy or idealism. They, therefore, go a 
 little further. They as good as say, “True we have 
 lost, but this is a thing worth losing on, we are 
 willing to try again, to run the risk of losing more, 
 not necessarily in the hope of getting back what we 
 have lost, but because here is an Idea behind, and for 
 Ideas we are willing to pay. We will back this dark 
 horse of yours, we will roll another cheese down the 
 hill.” I fancy it was in much this spirit that people 
 subscribed money to Cecil Rhodes’ Cape to Cairo 
 dream, not because they really thought they were going 
 to see the dream fulfilled in their lifetime or his, but 
 because there was an Idea behind it. This attitude 
 is not the attitude of Commercialism, it is something 
 bigger, but it does turn up in Commercialism sometimes. 
 
 70 
 
It may be said, therefore, to take us a step further in 
 our game, though it does not solve our problem. 
 Shareholder No. 9 offers a solution. It is the solution 
 already touched upon above, the solution found by 
 some of the leading Arts & Crafts businesses — Morris’, 
 Benson’s, Powell’s and others that could be mentioned. 
 But after all what does this solution amount to ? To 
 run a cheap or reduplicative business at a profit, in 
 order that you may practise Arts & Crafts at a loss, 
 is only a partial economic solution. It does not get 
 to the root of the matter; we need something better. 
 Whether we be on the extreme right with the Tories, 
 or on the extreme left with the Socialists, or even 
 wobble in the great centre with the Whigs, we want, 
 if we believe in the Arts & Crafts, to find them an 
 economic basis for themselves. Shareholder No. 9, it 
 is true, comes nearer; he touches on the land question, 
 but he has hardly made his suggestion when he scorn- 
 fully dismisses it. I do not agree with the view he 
 takes for reasons which later on in Chapter XV. I 
 shall hope to make clear, — but he realizes that the 
 essential characteristic of the Guild has been to make 
 life through the Arts & Crafts a more complete thing. 
 Cadbury’s village at Bournville, as he points out, and 
 Lever’s village at Port Sunlight have sought to 
 humanize leisure ; the Guild at Campden has gone 
 further & sought to humanize work. The distinction 
 in modern Industry is a vital one. 
 
 Shareholder No. 10 gets us a little nearer still. With- 
 out actually stating how it is to be put into practice 
 he lays down the principle. I quote his words: 
 
 "You must find some bond, some dovetailing into your surroundings, 
 not only to solve the difficulties of the ebb and flow of employment, 
 but also to give tone to your productions. In China, where they seem 
 to think in salaries and wages, the minimum salary was supposed to be 
 what a man could get from tilling a plot of land with his own hands. 
 All above that was special merit. This seems bed rock, doesn’t it ? ” 
 
 71 
 
I think that does get us indeed to bed rock as far as the 
 Arts & Crafts are concerned, and we may well learn 
 a lesson if not actually from China then certainly from 
 those countries where the Arts & Crafts have been or 
 are still practised in conjunction with agriculture. 
 We might point to it in Ceylon. I have myself seen 
 it in Hungary, in Spain, in Italy, in Germany; many 
 instances might be given. True, their success is often 
 due to the fact that the Industrial system has never 
 penetrated, but it does not therefore follow that we 
 may not yet intelligently master it, or that we who 
 are caught in it should not learn our lesson. For in 
 so doing may we not be achieving two things, a 
 revival of the Arts & Crafts, and a revival of agricul- 
 ture also. Shareholder No. io, then, holds the right 
 end of the stick, but even he has, to my thinking, 
 not got a complete grip of it. 
 
 To accomplish this we need other things as well, we 
 need certain fundamental social reforms, we need a 
 grasp of country conditions, we need a development 
 of the co-operative spirit among craftsmen themselves, 
 and we need the limitation of machinery in the interest 
 of Arts and Crafts and Agriculture conjointly. These 
 are the things which I shall try more fully to show 
 in subsequent chapters. 
 
 Shareholder No. i i helps us over another stile, he 
 suggests a humanizing of the shareholder as well as a 
 humanizing of the workshop. He suggests a plan by 
 which groups of shareholders shall take the return on 
 their investments, in kind instead of in cash; thus 
 becoming a body of patrons and giving permanent 
 support to a group of craftsmen — a suggestion, which 
 if developed, as I shall show in Chapters XII. and 
 XIII., might give us much of what was best in the 
 mediaeval system under which good craftsmanship so 
 flourished. 
 
Shareholder No. 12 makes the very pertinent com- 
 ment, which in itself is a sort of corollary to No. 1 1, 
 that profit sharing and joint stock holding when in 
 conjunction are unsound in principle; with this I 
 concur, for reasons which I shall try to set forth in 
 the next chapter. 
 
 Shareholder No. 1 3 reminds us very aptly of the need 
 there is in craftsmanship as in other things of touching 
 the average want of the community. The want is 
 there, the difficulty of fulfilling it, is one of method. 
 The last of my Shareholders, No. 14, — I wish I might 
 reveal his name,— lays the axe to the root of the tree. 
 He brings out more than any of the others the larger 
 educational & social ideas that underlie the Arts and 
 Crafts. Taking the Guild of Handicraft perhaps as 
 a type of what they should stand for in Industry 
 he says 
 
 “ From what I have seen and know of it, I have long felt it to be a 
 piece of real civilization in Industry, combining not merely a corporate 
 interest in the work done, but a corporate life outside work . . . The 
 Guild in short has been a real society not an aggregation of ‘hands.’ 
 It is this that I have always admired in it, and I think it a matter of 
 very great regret that this little oasis of human life should be sub- 
 merged in the unintelligent ocean of competitive industry.” 
 
 This shareholder indeed has recognised that the Arts 
 and Crafts stand for civilization in Industry, that they 
 imply life as a whole, and while he offers us no 
 practical solution, not being himself in or of the 
 workshop, he points for us the moral of the new 
 State. He sees what so many of the disciples of 
 Morris preach without practising, and what so many 
 of the Collectivist Socialists have so far been incapable 
 of seeing at all, that the new State, whether it call 
 itself Socialist or Labour, Greater England, American 
 or Cosmopolitan, Free Trade or Protectionist, must 
 find a place for the Arts and Crafts if it is to attain 
 
civilization. This shareholder — I wish there were 
 many such — has from outside recognised the fact, 
 which even we ourselves have but dimly discerned 
 from within, that the Guild of Handicraft has been 
 an attempt at civilization in Industry. Unconsciously 
 we have arrived at this position through our work, 
 unconsciously we have found out that it is just this 
 that the Arts and Crafts can do for life, because like 
 their own cunningly wrought vessels of silver and 
 gold, they carry their own intrinsic worth, their 
 civilizing force within themselves. 
 
 My little group of shareholders then, those of them 
 particularly that are sorrowful at the loss of their 
 investments, may at least take this to their comfort. 
 The capital has not in the larger sense been lost. It 
 has made for a civilization within Industry, and I do 
 not for a moment doubt but that others will come 
 forward and, seeing that the thing has once been 
 done, will do it better and on a greater scale. 
 Perhaps after all, modern Industry is worth civilizing ! 
 In a sense our little group of outside or absentee 
 shareholders epitomizes the relationship of Capital to 
 Labour on the one hand, and the relationship of 
 Capital to Craftsmanship or non-mechanical labour 
 on the other. What this little group of shareholders 
 is ill petto to the workmen of the Guild of Handicraft, 
 the capitalists of the whole community are to the 
 whole mass of labour, with perhaps a little more than 
 the usual amount of idealism thrown in, and the 
 investment of their capital (some £9,000 over a 
 period of twenty years) in craftsmanship, could, to 
 carry the analogy of the microcosm further, be fitly 
 paralleled by the investment of the whole community 
 in Arts and Crafts — it is a trifle. It is a trifle because 
 the community has not as yet regarded the Arts and 
 Crafts as other than outside life, as things that are 
 74 
 
marginal, accessories, luxuries, trifles to be dispensed 
 with when money is short, or that should not be 
 allowed to come in the way of our great, logical, 
 well ventilated collectivist system. But we of the 
 Arts and Crafts are there to bring them into life once 
 again, and to this end we have got to fasten them 
 upon the real useful things of life. Hence we are 
 brought face to face with the question of the limita- 
 tion of superfluous machinery, and the control of 
 industry by labour, as distinct from its control by 
 finance. In our view the community is not interested 
 in the Arts and Crafts,, because it does not as yet 
 understand what is meant by them ; and because it 
 thus regards them as unserviceable and marginal, it 
 leaves them to scramble for themselves as best they 
 may, supported hazardously as we have seen in the 
 case of the Guild of Handicraft by a few kindly and 
 sympathetic shareholders, who, after foregoing dividend 
 and risking principal for four or five years, shrug their 
 shoulders and say, “Now we must stop!” The 
 community in short accords to the Arts and Crafts as 
 yet no stable economic basis. 
 
CHAPTER VII. LIMITED LIABILITY AND 
 PROFIT SHARING. 
 
 In this chapter I want to examine the good and 
 bad in Limited Liability and Profit Sharing, as we 
 have experienced it, and to determine the usefulness 
 to the work of Arts and Crafts of these two media 
 for carrying business through. The general conclusion 
 I arrive at is that the combination of Profit Sharing 
 with joint stock enterprise is, as far as the A rts 
 and Crafts are concerned, unsound in principle, 
 and I find myself in substantial agreement with 
 Shareholder No. 12, to whom reference was made 
 in the foregoing chapter. I will endeavour to set 
 forth the reasons for this. 
 
 It may in general be said that Limited Liability and 
 in lesser degree Profit Sharing are the products of 
 the Industrial System, and as such are more applicable 
 to the great industrial concerns than to the Arts & 
 Crafts, which for success require smaller and more 
 human conditions. The first provides a means of 
 increasing collective capital, the second secures to 
 the workman an interest upon the increment. It 
 is not my intention to give any exhaustive review 
 or criticism of either, nor am I capable of doing this. 
 I wish merely to point to the essential features in 
 either and show how they may help or hinder the 
 work of Arts and Crafts. We have had ten years of 
 limited liability and so have given it a fair trial ; as 
 to profit sharing, seeing that ever since we left London 
 there have not been any profits to share, our experience 
 can scarcely be said to be so conclusive. The two 
 things however must be taken together. 
 
 76 
 
The general effect of limited liability is to accentuate 
 the line of cleavage between capital and labour, to de- 
 humanize capital, to make of the shareholder more & 
 more of an absentee. Those of our outside or non- 
 Guildsmen shareholders who during the last ten years 
 attended the annual shareholders’ meeting will have 
 noticed the line of demarcation between capital and 
 labour, expressed as between the absentee holder and 
 the working holder. We were all shareholders in 
 greater or lesser degree, but in the men’s minds the 
 difference instinctively was as between labour and 
 absenteeism, the outside holders were listened to with 
 courtesy and welcomed with distinction, but somehow 
 they were not “ labour.” I on the other hand though 
 one of the chief shareholders, was treated by the men 
 as one of themselves, and because as working designer 
 I was in and out of the workshops every day. * 
 
 This is adduced to show the- greater need there is in 
 the non-mechanical forms of labour, — the Arts and 
 Crafts, — of contact between men and men, between 
 master and man, between senior and junior, between 
 craftsman and apprentice. It is indeed necessary for 
 those of us who work in these lines, to come into 
 direct contact with our material, to devise, change, 
 modify, invent as we go along, to talk about things 
 at the bench, to approach our work simply, and 
 straightforwardly. 
 
 Telephones, typewriters, stenographers, chartered 
 accountants’ method of double entry, patent filed 
 correspondence systems, all the splendid complexities 
 of modern business efficiency, do at present, but take 
 us craftsmen away from our objective, they tend to 
 make us less efficient in the particular work we have 
 
 * Our first honorary Guildsman, however , my colleague on the 
 board, was an exception to all rules , bccaitse he was everybody s 
 friend and trusted by all. 
 
to do, they should not do this, but at present they do. 
 It may also be said that the rigid control by finance 
 which is implied in Limited Liability, the want of 
 freedom in the directive head, tends to produce a 
 certain type of workshop organisation. It is not 
 necessarily the factory organisation, but it is an 
 organisation that must check risk on the one hand 
 and that tends to run up the price of labour on the 
 other. It engenders a system under which every- 
 thing to the least moment of a man’s labour is 
 calculated in terms of price, of monetary value, of so 
 much per hour. Such an organisation and such a 
 system is uncongenial to the Arts & Crafts, it is 
 expensive and wasteful within the workshop itself. 
 I would put it thus : When a man is engaged in 
 work that he likes, or in which his own character or 
 personality finds expression, he is invariably liberal of 
 his time, he does not calculate to a nicety, he gives 
 good measure because he likes to give good measure, 
 he gives it not because he wants the other man to 
 have it, but because it is a pleasure to him as the 
 producer to give it. When he has to calculate to a 
 nicety, to balance stock-holders’ risks against his own 
 labour, he reckons all this labour in cash, the cash 
 calculation naturally takes precedence, and the margin 
 of good measure disappears. He is in effect told, 
 “ Never mind whether you are going to like this 
 work or not, what is it going to cost, — that’s what 
 we want to know, — -so that we can protect our 
 shareholders against loss.” 
 
 Those who have worked in the shops will be familiar 
 with the phrase, “ the dead horse.” The dead horse 
 is the job upon which all the wages have been drawn, 
 but upon which work has still to be done. It is an 
 expressive metaphor, it suggests decomposition, work 
 in which there is no more either of life or joy, but 
 78 
 
which has none the less to be finished. The “ dead 
 horse ” may turn up under any conditions where the 
 workman undertakes to labour for a price, but it is 
 not possible where there is both a margin of leisure 
 and pleasure in the work. 
 
 For the Arts & Crafts then another system is not only 
 desirable, but would certainly be more economical. 
 Such a system should be one by which the little 
 workman worked on his own, and took his own 
 risks. A system by which, if he gave the margin of 
 good measure, he would give it not to himself and 
 not to the stockholder, but put it into the work. 
 
 Is it possible, I ask myself, that out of this system of 
 the limited liability company which we of the Guild 
 are now abandoning, something may yet be made to 
 the service of the Arts and Crafts ? Perhaps, for I 
 fancy if at any later time one were again to contem- 
 plate the possibility of running productive artistic 
 workshops upon the basis of limited liability the right 
 way to do it would be to devise some way of paying 
 dividend in kind, with the further understanding that 
 Capital might if necessary be written down by divi- 
 sion of manufactured stock among the shareholders. 
 This would be equivalent to periodical subsidies from 
 capital, for capital would have to be periodically 
 renewed, but it would get us a little nearer the 
 suggestion of humanizing the shareholders, which is 
 touched upon in letter No. i i, referred to in the last 
 Chapter. King Francis, when he was in the Castle 
 of Little Nello and exchanged doubts and criticisms 
 with his craftsmen, was just such a humanized share- 
 holder ; if things went well he took the work, if ill 
 he shared in the roup ; and though we are far from 
 hoping for such enlightenment as the King of 
 Culture showed, still this bringing of their personal 
 interests together would be an excellent thing both 
 
 79 
 
for the makers and the patrons of Arts and Crafts ; 
 it would mean that the shareholder would not be 
 merely a gatherer of tribute which he was to spend 
 later in buying other commodities, — it would make 
 the craftsman feel he was working for some human 
 objective. 
 
 Nobody, however, could apply the term “ tribute 
 gatherers ” to the Guild shareholders, for they in the 
 last five years have had nothing to gather. Had 
 these kindly, long-suffering people now been the 
 richer by some silver teapots, some good tableware, 
 some well printed books, some electric-light fittings 
 or some solid furniture, it would surely have been 
 better for them, it would have saved what is now 
 likely to result, viz., the throwing away of these 
 things at market value to satisfy the commercial con- 
 ditions imposed upon a liquidator who is theoretically 
 acting in their interest. 
 
 It seems, therefore, as if limited liability, in that it 
 impedes direct contact between producer and patron, 
 and sets up a complex machinery in between them, 
 is unsuitable for the Arts and Crafts ; but that by 
 some modifications in the Articles of Association, or 
 the Company Law, whereby the return of labour 
 could be made in kind, this might be remedied. 
 
 The results of profit sharing I have in part already 
 touched on in Chapter II., where I pointed out some 
 of the weaknesses of the system. Its principal dis- 
 advantage is the remoteness of the reward : interest, 
 dividend, or bonus when widely distributed, and in 
 accordance with rate of wages earned, is very trifling 
 unless the profits be regular and high ; the reward 
 when set beside the immediate value of the wage 
 itself is too far distant. When, moreover, things go 
 the other way, and the business is losing, the 2 \ per 
 cent, deduction from wages, by the payment of which, 
 80 
 
as in the Guild of Handicraft, the men gradually 
 acquired their shares in the business, was found to be 
 an unfair tax upon the workman, for it hit him at a 
 time when work was scarce and wages were reduced. 
 Thus it became a handicap upon thrift rather than 
 the reverse as originally intended. 
 
 These are the disadvantages of the system. On the 
 other hand we may claim that during 20 years of 
 work there has never with us been such a thing as a 
 labour dispute, nor the faintest appearance of one. A 
 perusal of the five volumes of minute books, three of 
 the Guild’s minutes and two of the Company’s 
 minutes, will show how point after point as it came 
 up was settled, not in the foolish arbitrary way by the 
 Capitalist dictator on the one hand, or the Trade 
 Union dictator on the other, but with sweet reason- 
 ableness across the table. We have had every 
 conceivable sort of detail in life and work to handle 
 and discuss, and all has been done humanly ; the 
 carrying out of contracts, the question of bribery, 
 trade union rules, the elections of labour directors, the 
 appointment of manager, the dignity of foremen, the 
 saving of gold and silver lemels, the abuse of the 
 Queen’s English, the slackness of work, levies for 
 sickness or death, beanfeasts and plays, they have all 
 been dealt with by or with the men, and the result 
 has in every case been good — why not ? 
 
 In my opinion, however, by far the most valuable 
 portion of the Guild’s profit sharing system has been 
 the institution of the labour directorate — the system 
 by which one director on the Board has every year 
 been appointed by the head voting of labour as distinct 
 from the share voting of capital. I have no hesitation 
 in saying that during the ten years’ incorporation this 
 system has worked admirably. The men have every 
 year selected for themselves, and the position on the 
 
 81 
 
board has almost always been filled with loyalty and 
 discretion. They selected in Guild meeting from the 
 various trades of the Guild, and they chose four times 
 a cabinet maker, three times a jeweller, once a wood 
 polisher, once an enameller, and once a carver. I 
 venture to think that many a great industrial concern 
 might do worse than institute the principle of the 
 labour directorate. Indeed, there are signs that the 
 development of Industry is rapidly moving in that 
 direction, and I believe I am right in saying that the 
 Guild of Handicraft, Limited, was the first registered 
 company that practically carried out this vitally 
 important principle of the representation of labour. 
 It will be observed that the labour director appointed 
 by head voting is a very different person from the 
 labour partner, in the unregistered business, or the 
 regular director on the ordinary company board. 
 He has the same powers, but his interests are 
 not directly the interests of capital, and he looks at 
 all questions first from the point of view of labour.* 
 As Industry grows less commercial, as the conception 
 of the qualitative as distinct from the quantitative 
 standard takes shape, as the Trade Unions begin more 
 to accept responsibility for the standard of work as 
 distinct from the rate of wages and the length of the 
 hours of labour, so will this principle of the labour 
 directorate become a force in Industry, and it will 
 become a dominating force, because, not being 
 directly concerned with profits, it will inevitably be 
 on the side of Standard in workmanship and in life. 
 
 * I extract from “ The Daily Telegraph ” of Feb. 28 , 1908 , the 
 following, which seems to be a step in the direction indicated : — 
 “ Sir William Mather , presiding at Manchester yesterday at 
 the annual ?neeting of Mather and Platt (Limited) , engineers , 
 stated that it had been decided to create a special board of directors 
 composed of heads of the various departments. It would be a body 
 composed of servants of the company.” 
 
 82 
 
CHAPTER VIII. THE FOUR WAYS OUT. 
 
 How then are we to secure the economic basis for 
 the Crafts for which we are searching, where are they 
 to stand in modern Industry ? how are we to check 
 these wasteful and devastating invasions of the machine 
 into provinces that should be sacred to human skill 
 and imagination ? 
 
 Our vision is limited to the economic conditions of 
 our own day, but there seem to me to be four ways 
 out, four lines upon which we must move. The 
 Technical School, the Amateur, the Trade Unions, 
 and the Land, or as it might be more fitting to call 
 it, the small holding in the country. Before 1 
 develop the ideas under these four heads I would like 
 to give some little experiences from the more human 
 history of the Guild, to show how existing economic 
 conditions militate against continuity in craftsmanship. 
 It is perhaps a little early to write any account of the 
 doings of those men who have worked in the Guild 
 and left it to work elsewhere, nor would they like me 
 to do so ; but a general reference to what some of 
 them are doing will not be out of place and will take 
 me to what I want to say here. Several are running 
 businesses of their own. Two or three are the 
 responsible foremen or managers of large undertakings, 
 one is a town councillor in a great industrial centre, 
 whose following controls a large voting power, three 
 or four hold prominent posts at, or are the heads of 
 Technical Institutes, several are the trusted instructors 
 under County Councils in different parts of England, 
 and others of the younger ones are doing well and 
 shaping ways for themselves in the Colonies. These 
 
 83 
 
facts are not generally known except to me, because 
 I have made a point of keeping in touch with as 
 many as possible of the men who have passed through 
 the shops. Most of these men too have their names 
 still on the Guild roll. They like to remain connected 
 with it. In watching their careers I feel a certain 
 sympathetic unconcern, for I know the idealism is 
 somehow going into the right place, and will tell in 
 the end. 
 
 But there are two considerations arising from these 
 facts that are worth noting. All the men to whom 
 I refer were craftsmen and first-rate craftsmen ; with 
 hardly a single exception they did not wish to leave 
 the Guild, & many of them continued with the Guild 
 for lower wages than they could command outside 
 it until circumstances in one way or another compelled 
 them to leave, & leaving has meant in almost every 
 case abandoning the Craft . 
 
 I always think that these facts are in themselves a 
 heavy indictment of the existing system of Industry, 
 and a refutation of the economic fiction that greed & 
 idleness are the two factors that go to the making of 
 the economic man. It gives one confidence too, an 
 immense confidence, in the reserve power of the 
 English working classes. They will do for their own 
 organisations what they will not do for a system which 
 exploits them, and it makes one believe that when 
 they do get control of Industry they will shape the 
 state into something much finer than it is at present, 
 or that it can ever be made by those who are out of 
 sympathy with labour. 
 
 Be that as it may, a great many of my best craftsmen 
 have one after another and most unwillingly been 
 driven out of the craft. What then, we ask, shall come 
 of the craft ? Is not the craft the raison d'etre 
 both of their life and the life of our Guild ? These 
 84 
 
men loved their craft & had no wish to leave it, they 
 for many years made considerable sacrifices to be 
 allowed to continue practising it, circumstances finally 
 forced them out of craftsmanship into workshop orga- 
 nisation, into education, into politics, into Socialistic 
 propaganda. Perhaps it is good that this should have 
 been, but again one asks how about the craft ? Does it 
 not mean that we are wasting the finer material of 
 labour in road making and rough hewing ? From the 
 point of view of the Arts and Crafts we want to keep 
 this finer material within our ranks. 
 
 Now of my four ways of doing this I am devoting to 
 the first, The Technical School, and to the fourth, 
 Agriculture, a special chapter. But I want here as 
 far as possible to examine all four in their relation 
 one to another. It is not by one cord alone that the 
 Arts and Crafts shall be saved from falling back into 
 the Industrial abyss, it needs a fourfold strand. 
 
 Let us take first the Technical School. I lay it 
 down as an axiom that Education in the Arts and 
 Crafts to be effective must be practical, and that 
 practical education can only be got in the workshop. 
 Hence if we are really to make our Technical Schools 
 efficient we must have in them workshops where the 
 best type of products shall be made and if need be 
 sold. To put it the other way round, our 
 Teachers must be not only teachers but also pro- 
 ducers, and they must continue producing all through 
 the time of their continuing to teach. This principle 
 denied so far to the Arts and Crafts, is recognised & 
 regarded as essential by the Scientists, who insist that 
 no true education in Science can be given, exceptwhere 
 research work is always going on. Research work for 
 the craftsman is his own continuous & inventive pro- 
 duction. The reason of its denial in the Arts & Crafts 
 is Commercialism, the rule of Industry by finance. 
 
 85 
 
The employers of labour who at present dominate the 
 County Councils, through whom the money is voted 
 for Technical Education, are quite right from their 
 point of view in handicapping Education and making it 
 ineffective. Why should they help train up young men 
 to compete against themselves ? As I have already 
 shown in this book the profitable products are the re- 
 duplicative products. What the employers of labour 
 want are hands and occasional foremen, to this end 
 the scope of the Technical School at present is 
 necessarily limited. 
 
 I want, however, to see the Technical School very 
 much widened, I want to see it become a sort of 
 organisation for non-competitive municipal trading, 
 but trading in the very best work only — a university 
 of craftsmanship — and I want to see the axiom 
 accepted that to be a good technical instructor 
 in the Arts & Crafts the practising workman 
 shall be encouraged to remain a working Crafts- 
 man. At present the reverse is the case. 
 I have sent some eight of my craftsmen to 
 different polytechnics or technical schools, they have 
 all been good workmen, but in becoming teachers 
 they appear to have become mere teachers. Now it 
 is upon the opposite of this principle that the tech- 
 nical school should be run ; nobody should be 
 allowed to remain a teacher unless he gave continuous 
 evidence of productive skill. 
 
 I shall return to this portion of my subject later, 
 where I have devoted a special chapter to the Edu- 
 cation question. If the saving of the Arts and 
 Crafts through the technical schools is the first way 
 out, the second is through the amateur. Now the 
 amateur, whom we considered before under the 
 synonym of “dear Emily,” should really be of the 
 very greatest help to the Crafts ; under a system of 
 ' 86 
 
healthy competition he would be. The amateur has 
 at his disposal what the mediasval craftsman had — 
 infinite leisure — and like the “ artist in the City of 
 Kouroo,” “ Time is of no account to him,” so that 
 he ought to be able to devote himself to Standard 
 entirely ; all he needs is proper training. It is 
 probable that people with leisure will more and 
 more tend to work at the crafts, and that through 
 the amateur the traditional methods and the Standard 
 of the crafts may be kept up, but much organisation 
 is needed to bring this about. The whole system 
 under which amateurs are trained, under which they 
 exhibit and sell their things, needs ordering and 
 drawing out of its present terrible confusion. Both 
 they themselves and the craftsmen for whose market 
 they compete, have got to be protected from the 
 crowd of middle men, bric-a-brac hunters & sharks, 
 who run so-called private galleries, where for large 
 profits the stuff is sold. I do not see why this should 
 not be regulated by the building of municipal galleries 
 in connection with the technical schools, where 
 periodical exhibitions might be held, and all craftsmen, 
 whether amateur or otherwise, be allowed to exhibit 
 and sell freely their own things, subject to a committee 
 of approval, who should determine the standard and 
 adjudge a fair price for the goods irrespective of 
 whether a man or woman had other means of lively- 
 hood, was or was not an amateur. This would serve 
 two purposes, it would get the amateur more under 
 control, and so hinder his unfair competition with the 
 skilled craftsman, and it would make it more difficult 
 for the private gallery sharks to prey upon both. It 
 is not only the private galleries that subsist upon the 
 competition between Amateur and Craftsman. Many 
 distributive houses, large and small, find in this un- 
 regulated warfare the best part of their Xmas profits 
 
 87 
 
and their spring season ; and I know cases at present 
 in which amateur jewellery that is produced for 7/6 
 a piece is sold in the West End for £2 2s. Number- 
 less instances could be given. As these sheets are 
 going to press I am informed of another case of a 
 wealthy lady connected with one of the large London 
 drapery establishments and who has some skill in 
 enamelling. She devotes the proceeds of her crafts- 
 manship, which she disposes of through the drapers, 
 to the maintenance of cripple homes. The profits of 
 course go to the draper, but I also happen to know 
 the craftsmen whose livelihood she is destroying and 
 whose Standard she is bringing down. The great 
 house Novelty, Nobody & Co. who have done me the 
 honour of stealing silver work from me, once stole 
 pottery from one of the most hopeful little home Arts 
 centres in England, thereby nearly destroying the out- 
 put and ruining the craft. The process by which 
 this was done was a recognised commercial one, and 
 hence strictly according to the canons of modern 
 business, it was the process of cornering, by which the 
 whole output of the little pottery was quietly absorbed 
 for several years by the great House, with a view to 
 their becoming the sole agents, so that when the little 
 pottery tried to make an opening elsewhere it was 
 faced with the competition of its own products. In 
 short, at the present moment the small working crafts- 
 man is largely in the hands of the distributor and is 
 bled by him, while when he seeks to combine as we of 
 the Guild have done, to do things on a larger scale so 
 that he can become his own distributor, the cutting 
 competition affects him equally, and he gets into the 
 hands of his banker. 
 
 Our third way out is through the principle of Trade 
 Unionism and the co-operation of the Trade Unions. 
 There are two things that could be done here. The 
 
 88 
 
first is to get the existing Trade Unions whose work 
 touches more upon craftsmanship and less upon 
 machinery, to give a greater recognition than they do 
 at present to skill, to invite and encourage them to 
 co-operate in educational questions, questions that 
 deal with workmanship as distinct from wages. The 
 second is to form a new trade union of Craftsmen 
 only. In a certain sense the Art Worker’s Guild is 
 such a Union, but I would like to see a newer, larger 
 and wider organisation formed, which would lay down 
 rules among its members with a view to protecting 
 them against the unfair competition upon which I 
 have already laid so much stress. My experience 
 with the many Trade Unionists that have passed 
 through the Guild workshops, representing as they 
 have done many of the leading Unions in London, 
 convinces me not only that the men would be ready 
 to welcome any movement in the direction of standard 
 as distinct from wages, but also that they would not 
 look unfavourably upon a newer and larger Union, 
 such as a union of craftsmen would become, and into 
 this Union none should be allowed to enter except 
 such as had given satisfactory evidence of high 
 technical skill. 
 
 One other way out there still is, and that is the land. 
 The more I have watched competitive conditions in 
 the town and the way in which periods of industrial 
 depression affect the Craftsman in the Country, the 
 more I am convinced that some subsidiary occupation 
 which he can practise for maintenance rather than for 
 exchange is essential to the Craftsman. We need not 
 make of him what is known as a small holder, but he 
 should have, in conjunction with a number of other 
 Craftsmen working simultaneously, an agricultural 
 occupation at his door that he can practise with his 
 craft, an occupation that shall not in itself suffice to 
 
 «9 
 
keep him in comfort, but that shall supply him with 
 the basic needs of life, bread, vegetables, fruit, meat, 
 milk and poultry. 
 
 In my view none of these four ways will in themselves 
 alone solve for us our problem of finding an economic 
 basis for the Arts and Crafts, but taken altogether I 
 think they will, for the reason that through them the 
 subject will be tackled in town and country alike. 
 We have had unfortunately too much legislation for 
 the town alone. 
 
 90 
 
CHAPTER IX. THE ESSENTIAL NEED OF 
 STANDARD AND ITS PROTECTION. 
 
 I have spoken a good deal about Standard, but have so 
 far given no definition of the term. I mean by it in 
 craftsmanship that model or test of excellence which is. 
 set up by authority within the Crafts, as having fixed 
 or permanent value, beside which the Crafts, and the 
 men that practise them shall measure themselves. 
 
 It is interesting to compare this use of the word 
 Standard with the meaning implied in the term 
 Standardizing as used in the trade. To Standardize 
 means to make a pattern or type to which any 
 subsequent quantity can be made. It does not 
 postulate goodness, nor does it imply badness ; it 
 ignores quality, but it necessitates quantity. 
 
 The constructive economists, especially those of what 
 may be called, the Socialist school, are beginning to- 
 see the need of a dual Standard, a qualitative as well 
 as quantitative, and in the determination of the 
 former many of the trades of the country and all the 
 arts and crafts are involved. How is it to be 
 determined ? It is the painter who can best say 
 whether a picture is well painted, it is the lawyer 
 who can best determine whether a deed is well 
 drafted, the doctor must diagnose disease and pre- 
 scribe the remedy, the chemist must test the experi- 
 ment in the laboratory ; and so it is in Industry. 
 The standard in every industry is best determined by 
 those that labour in it ; theirs should be the authority., 
 it is for them to say where is the fixed or permanent 
 value. This is but another way of saying again that 
 production must be controlled by the producer, and 
 to this refrain we must continually be returning. 
 
 9 1 
 
I wish in this Chapter to lay down four propositions, 
 and they are the following : — 
 
 1. That Standard is inseparable from the right 
 
 living of life. In other words that the 
 man and the product must be regarded 
 together. 
 
 2. That the proper solution to the over-produc- 
 
 tion of cheap and worthless things is the 
 limitation of their output and the improve- 
 ment of their quality. 
 
 3. That for the sake of Standard the little 
 
 workshops must be saved. 
 
 4. That the limitation of machinery and the 
 
 consequent decentralization of the great 
 towns is a necessary outcome of the three 
 above propositions. 
 
 To begin with my first, viz., that Standard is 
 inseparable from the right living of life, and that 
 the man and the product must be considered together. 
 It is only in quite recent times that this so obvious 
 truth has been regarded as having any relation to 
 practical things. When Ruskin nearly half a century 
 ago said that “cheap things made cheap men,” 
 everybody thought the proposition absurd, but when 
 Mr. Joseph Chamberlain suddenly repeated it as his 
 own, in his own great city of Birmingham, at a time 
 when things were getting unpleasantly cheaper and 
 cheaper, it was found to be true. There is nothing 
 like having the shoe pinch for bringing home the 
 truth ! The strange thing is that at all other great 
 periods in the world’s history, the great civilizations 
 have accepted this truth as an integral part of their 
 social economy. We, however, have been blinded by the 
 apparent success and the superficial results of our 
 
 9 2 
 
Industrialism from seeing it. But suddenly we are 
 faced with a phenomenon, a monster with two heads, 
 that we had never observed before. A vast output 
 of rotten, useless, sweated, cheap industries, and a 
 vast growth of nerveless, characterless, underfed, cheap 
 men and women. The monster stands face to face 
 with our civilization, it threatens to extinguish our 
 culture, to destroy our life as a people. 
 
 It is perhaps superfluous to cite instances to show 
 that the cheap product and the cheap human being 
 re-act upon one another. Charles Booth’s statistics 
 of London, Seebohm Rowntree’s statistics of York, 
 the recruiting returns during the South African war, 
 or an examination of the slums and slum product of 
 every town in England are evidence enough. What 
 I wish here rather to show is what is not generally 
 accepted, viz., that the cheap shop brings down the 
 good shop. We are so accustomed to the comfortable 
 theory that in competitive industry the good will 
 prevail, that there is always a market for the best,, 
 because there has usually been a margin of wealth in 
 some section of the Community to provide the 
 market, that we have never questioned this seeming 
 truth. But it is not true, or rather it is a half truth, 
 for its qualification lies in modern competitive con- 
 ditions. There is a certain famous economic law 
 known as Gresham’s law by which the bad coin, if 
 shot upon the market, drives out the good ; the same 
 law prevails in many forms of Industry, and in most 
 of the Arts and Crafts. Unless protected in some 
 way by labour legislation, by Trade Unionism, or in 
 their actual market, the standard of certain produc- 
 tions tends under modern economic conditions to sink, 
 and the human standard sinks with it ; the good does 
 not necessarily prevail. 
 
 I could give numberless instances of this from my 
 
 93 
 
experience of the Crafts, but I offer three out of the 
 Guild’s history. In the year 1898 the Guild took 
 over from William Morris’s executors the plant of the 
 Kelmscott Press, and made arrangements with some 
 of his staff for joining its fellowship. Several impor- 
 tant books were printed, and others planned, and for 
 some years the traditions of good printing which the 
 xMaster Craftsman had initiated were continued under 
 the style of the Essex House Press, and with the 
 assistance of many of our leading artists & designers.* 
 All went well for several years, and in the year 1901 
 the little press started upon the Prayer Book of King 
 Edward VII. for His Majesty. Those of us who 
 were actively engaged in the venture however had 
 misgivings as to the gambling and speculation that 
 seemed to be pursuing it, and we felt that it was more 
 likely to injure than help labour and tradition. This 
 came to a head in 1903, when some of the vellum 
 copies of the Prayer Book upon the sheets of which I 
 was still at work at Campden, & for which the Press 
 was to receive from £20 to £30 a copy, “exchanged 
 hands” in America, one for ^360, another for £ 300 . 
 Now two things were happening at the same time. 
 Our Press, encouraged by the prices the public were 
 paying, planned the production of a Lectern Bible, T 
 but similarly encouraged, ten, twenty, fifty other 
 presses, mostly small producers like ourselves, in 
 England and America, rushed in and started printing, 
 many of them without any tradition or any control ; 
 
 * See “ Bibliography of the Essex House Press f published 1Q04. 
 Among those who worked for the Guild's Press were William 
 Strang , Reginald Savage , Walter Crane , George Thomson , 
 Laurence Housman , Paul Woodroffe , Edmund New , Fred 
 Griggs, & c. 
 
 r Sec “An Endeavour in the Teachings of John Ruskin and 
 William Morris f by C. R. Ashbee. 
 
 94 
 
publishers and booksellers scrambled for the profits, 
 *and the public, like an overfed child, swallowed good 
 and bad work alike till it was glutted. The point to 
 be observed is that the actual cash paid by the public 
 for Essex House Press books, over and above their 
 real value in cost of product, but which the Press 
 never received, was more than enough to print what 
 would have been its greatest work, its Lectern Bible ; 
 but the inability of labour to control market and 
 output resulted in the almost complete break up of 
 the tradition. The work that my friend William 
 Strang and I had been for a year or two engaged upon 
 was abandoned, and his drawings distributed. 
 
 In other words, the price of the good books had to 
 come down to the price of the bad books ; to a price 
 far below that at which it was possible to produce 
 them, and when the balance of the Press stock was 
 remaindered and touched bottom in 1907, the price 
 began to rise, and various people, “stags” they are 
 usually called, who regard books as commodities to 
 gamble in, began buying again. Meantime, however, 
 the work of good production ceased, the output had 
 to be stopped, and the staff discharged.* 
 
 The example of a Press, whether the printing is done 
 by hand or machine, may be regarded by some as 
 exceptional in character because of the artificial 
 nature of the book market. I therefore draw my 
 second example from the shop of the coppersmith, or 
 as he is now more usually called, the hammerman 
 
 * The work of the Essex House Press still continues at Campden. 
 We stopped it for a year owing to the depression and then revived 
 it. My friend ', Dr. A.K. Coomaraswamy , is at present printing , 
 .on the Press on which the Kelmscott Chaucer was printed, & with 
 the aid of some of the Essex House Press staff, his history of the 
 Arts and Crafts of Ceylon. This fact , however , does not affect 
 ihe argument of the break in Tradition and the spotting of 
 Standard, for it is exceptional. 
 
 95 
 
and chaser. In 1888 the Guild revived down in East 
 London the Craft of hammered metalwork (it was by* 
 way of protest to the japanned coalscuttle with a 
 landscape on the outside of it, which prevailed in 
 those days), several young fellows were taught a 
 useful and beautiful form of workmanship, and one 
 which for its full development requires high 
 Technical skill. 
 
 The frontispiece, drawn in 1889 by a past member 
 of the Guild, shows one of these men at work. 
 For the last four or five years however it has been 
 observed that this form of craftsmanship has died 
 out, orders for it in the Guild shops have ceased, 
 the public no longer buys it, and the craftsmen 
 have abandoned it and taken to other occupations 
 because they can no longer make a living at it. At 
 the same time every large distributive store in 
 England, and every little ironmongers’ shop in every 
 provincial town, is loaded up with imitation repousse 
 work, the bulk of it stamped by machinery, the rest 
 the work of boys who are never destined to learn the 
 craft. In other words Gresham’s law has acted, — 
 the bad coin has driven out the good. The cheap 
 uncontrolled product has destroyed the craft, the 
 absence of Standard in the bad shop has brought 
 down Standard in the good. As far as the Arts and 
 Crafts are concerned, it is fair to say that the reward, 
 or let us call it the penalty, for originality except in 
 reduplication, is as often as not industrial extinction ; 
 
 1 know that such a statement is directlv counter to 
 all individualist teaching, but it is none the less true. 
 Here is a third example, this time from the silver- 
 smiths and jewellers’ shop. Some years ago I designed 
 and made a silver brooch, it was exhibited at the 
 Guild’s depot in Brook Street. A sprightly gentle- 
 man walked into the shop one day and bought it, 
 96 
 
but the shopman’s suspicions 'were aroused by the 
 remark, “ I suppose if I don’t take the case you’ll 
 knock off 2 s. ” That is not a remark that the 
 average West End buyer makes, and the shopman 
 wisely marked both buyer and brooch. Six weeks 
 later he saw that brooch with 20 others like it in the 
 window of Messrs. Nobody, Novelty & Co., with a 
 label beneath it, “ Our exclusive designs.” I wrote 
 to the eminent firm asking them how they squared 
 this with their business conscience, though without 
 in any way intimating that they were thieves ; they 
 replied with equal politeness, but with amazing 
 cynicism, that all was as it should be, and that there 
 was no such thing as a business conscience. The 
 phraseology was somewhat as follows : — “ Do you 
 think, gentlemen,” said I, “ that to take the designs 
 of another man, copy and sell them as your own, is 
 altogether in accordance with the dignity of a house 
 of your standing ? I shall be glad to hear from you 
 
 97 
 
 G 
 
on the matter and beg to remain, gentlemen, yours, 
 etc., etc.” The reply ran somewhat thus : “ Your 
 statement, sir, may be true, we much regret that such 
 a thing should have happened. We cannot of course 
 accept responsibility for the actions of our buyers. 
 You will doubtless yourself have observed how 
 difficult it is to place a new article on the market and 
 that to do this at once implies many imitators, we 
 ourselves have many imitators and beg to remain, sir, 
 yours, etc., etc.” 
 
 Setting aside the cynicism of the rejoinder, a rejoinder 
 perfectly admissible under existing competitive con- 
 ditions, and which any British jury would uphold, 
 what I deduce from it is the need for the protection 
 of Standard, but perhaps not in the way that at first 
 sight appears. It is not I myself that desire to be 
 protected from the eminent firm who have appro- 
 priated my silver designs — by no means. I ask much 
 less and at the same time much more. It is not that 
 I mind having my designs stolen, though I may pity 
 the meanness of the thief, I know that I can always 
 make fresh ones, and no thieving really hurts inven- 
 tion or imagination. What I object to is that under 
 existing conditions the theft should make it impossible 
 for me to produce, or for the public to possess good 
 silver work and jewellery any more ; that any Jack 
 distributor with a little capital behind him can get 
 mechanical or underpaid imitations made of them in 
 some filthy phthisical cubby hole in a black, back 
 street in the mcdel city of Birmingham ; that is 
 what I object to, that is what is destroying my work 
 and the work of my Guildsmen ; because it destroys 
 it at the source. It is the sweated shop, the cheap 
 shop that is making the life of the good shop impos- 
 sible. I know those back streets and their foul shops 
 because I have been in them, I know the rotten 
 98 
 
99 
 
 G 2 
 
 7 he Guild Smithy. 
 
work that comes out of them, I know the men that 
 work in them, some of the foremen who have in- 
 directly to extract work from them have been work- 
 men in the Guild and personal friends of mine, and 
 they tell me what goes on, and how the processes of 
 mechanical Industry in their wastefulness and their 
 stupidity are conducted. I know that it is the un- 
 controlled stupidity and waste of such shops that 
 make it impossible for the good shops to live. It is 
 down at the bottom that we have got to start in order 
 to re-create Industry, in order to reconstruct the work- 
 shop, in order to find again their permanent economic 
 basis for the crafts in which Standard has its abiding 
 home. 
 
 Perhaps I shall be told that I weaken my case by 
 dwelling upon the unsanitary and evil character of 
 existing competitive conditions and that the well- 
 equipped factory of the most approved collectivist 
 type will be quite as great a danger to craftsmanship. 
 With that question I deal later on, but let us examine 
 first our second proposition that the right solution for 
 the over-production of cheap and worthless things is 
 the limitation of their output, and the improvement 
 of their quality. This seems such a reasonable pro- 
 position on the face of it that it is difficult to see how 
 anybody should refuse to accept it. The real difficulty 
 is how to put it into force, for everybody accepts it 
 in theory. Most people as soon as they know the 
 difference would, other things being equal, rather 
 have a good than a bad piece of work ; but they do 
 not know, and it often requires years of technical and 
 expert knowledge to understand. Some judge, some 
 adviser, some workshop expert is needed to say 
 whether the stuff is bad or good, and this judging 
 should be done in the workshop at the source. It 
 would he such an obvious economy to the consumer, 
 100 
 
for instance, in the matter of chairs, if instead of 
 buying 20 successive bad chairs at 10/- each over a 
 period of twenty years, the life of each chair being 
 limited to one year, he bought one good chair at 20/- 
 with a 20 years life, he would be paying 20/- for his 
 chair instead of ^10. Yet that is what the majority 
 of the people of this country are doing, and a vast 
 amount of poverty is directly traceable to waste on 
 the cheap commodity, and all on the plea of benefiting 
 the consumer. As for the producer it would be an 
 equal advantage to him, for the production of the one 
 good chair tends to make one good craftsman, while 
 the production of the 20 bad chairs stimulates an 
 endless quantity of half-skilled and ill-paid chai .'makers. 
 I feel here as if I were trailing my coat for the chair- 
 makers of High Wycombe, among whom I have many 
 personal friends, to tread upon : but that is as it 
 should be, for the head and front of these discussions 
 on Standard is that as consumers we do not know, but 
 that as producers it is our duty to know and to judge, 
 and that each industry contains within itself the deter- 
 mination of its own Standard. 
 
 This was brought home to me once in watching a 
 country auction. Among the lots were two sorts of 
 furniture, some well made Queen Anne, Elizabethan, 
 and modern hand made pieces, and a quantity of the 
 worst machine made “ Curtain Road ” stuff, stuff 
 that is known as cc slaughtered furniture.” The 
 bidding was fairly representative of a country sale and 
 there were a number of farmers’ wives and small 
 tradespeople present, but whereas all the good pieces 
 were sold for less than half what it would cost to 
 remake them, all the rotten pieces went for nearly 
 double their original retail price. The people were 
 accustomed to the rotten stuff and so they wanted it, 
 it was familiar to them and was part of their lives, 
 
 101 
 
had they been accustomed to the good stuff they would 
 have taken that with equal alacrity. The stopping at 
 the source of the making of the bad stuff would have 
 completely altered the bidding. 
 
 The limitation of output is often regarded, & rightly, 
 as being a robbery of the community. If the limitation 
 be one of worthless things, the robbery may be fortu- 
 nate and beneficial, if, better still, the limitation be 
 adjusted not only to the real wants of the community* 
 but in accordance with a Standard of good, set up 
 among the producers for the benefit of the community* 
 all question of robbery disappears. The process, how- 
 ever, by which production is to be controlled, limited* 
 and checked must be slow and gradual, but as in all 
 things, it is the Idea that must come first ; and if the 
 idea of the Standard of good can first be implanted in 
 the minds of the producers whether masters or men* 
 in every industry, we shall have got far towards 
 carrying our second proposition into effect. Where 
 output is limited now, it is usually done for purposes 
 of monopoly, to make greater profits for masters, to 
 raise wages for men, and if Standard is not at the same 
 time considered, the Community gets no quid pro 
 quo for the robbery inflicted upon it. 
 
 My third proposition is that for the sake of Standard 
 the little workshops must be saved. The peculiar 
 constitution of the Guild of Handicraft & its several 
 shops has perhaps made it easy for me to test the 
 comparative value of the small and the large shop ; 
 because in the Guild we have so often been on the 
 brink of the factory. When at one time we were 
 employing from 70 to 80 men in the different shops* 
 the temptation to adopt industrial methods was over- 
 whelming, but, as an artist, one knew that to do this 
 was to imperil Standard, and very often the Standard 
 did fall. The point at issue, indeed, as between the 
 102 
 
small shop and the factory is a vital one, for in it is 
 involved the whole question of human individuality, 
 of progressive invention, of tradition. 
 
 I will now draw an illustration from the Guild’s wood 
 shop. The cabinet I show on p. 105 shows what 
 I mean. It represents the labour of one skilled 
 ■ , ^cabinet maker for about three months at a wage of 
 £ 2 1 os. a week. For ten years the Guild made and 
 stocked one or two such pieces of furniture each year, 
 always from fresh designs, and whenever public exhi- 
 bition was possible it succeeded in selling what it 
 made. In the last few years we found that we had 
 five or six such pieces on our hands ; they represented 
 so much Capital locked up, not only bringing no 
 return, but subject to heavy depreciation ; and when 
 we were faced with the other fact that these pieces 
 on strict business lines had to be “written down” to 
 market value, i.e., what they would fetch at a forced 
 sale, it was obviouslv impossible to go on making. 
 Here we have my theorem of the electric light over 
 again, but adduced now as an illustration of the 
 
 103 
 
embargo set by modern Commercialism upon indi- 
 viduality. It ought to be possible for men who have 
 invention and skill to go on employing their talent 
 for the benefit of the Community, but unfortunately 
 it is not. The present system acts as a direct check 
 upon fresh creation. It affects the different Crafts in 
 varying measure, and it bears most heavily upon 
 those Crafts such as cabinet making, where the value 
 of the labour is higher than the value of the material. 
 The experience of the Guild is borne out by most of 
 my professional colleagues who have aimed at Standard 
 in craftsmanship. One of the most beautiful of 
 modern exhibitions of furniture was once held in 
 Clifford’s Inn Hall some years ago, and where the 
 pieces shown, many of them simple, straightforward 
 & useful pieces, bore the names of Lethaby, Spooner, 
 Barnsley, Gimson, and others with whom the Arts 
 and Crafts movement is identified. After the first 
 few pieces had been made the little venture had to 
 stop, the embargo upon fresh creation was pro- 
 hibitive. 
 
 I have selected the illustrations for this book 
 largely with the object of calling attention to 
 this point of individuality in Craftsmanship. We 
 of the Arts and Crafts claim that there is an 
 immense fund of inventive skill that is at present 
 running to waste, bleeding away, because it has 
 no means of expressing itself ; the commercial 
 system gives it no scope. We claim that for healthy 
 national life an outlet, a means of expression, must 
 be given to this so serviceable human quality ; we 
 claim that it should be allowed to exercise itself in 
 the useful rather than in the ornamental things. My 
 illustrations, whether in building, in furniture, in 
 table service, or in objects of personal adornment, 
 show both ; but whereas the Craftsman’s bias is to 
 104 
 
Cabinet wif/i three months' labour for one Craftsman. 
 
 105 
 
design and to make the useful thing, the Com- 
 munity more often drives him into making the other, 
 because it makes it impossible for him to market the 
 former, because it allows his invention to be stolen, 
 and appraises his market value at nil. 
 
 If the question as between the small shop and the 
 factory involves human individuality, progressive 
 invention and tradition, it involves pari passu 
 the future of the Socialistic State. I was 
 present not very long ago at a most interesting 
 discussion among the members of the Junior 
 Art Workers’ Guild upon Mr. Penty’s book 
 “The Restoration of the Guild System.” There 
 were present some political Socialists, and a peculiar 
 interest was given to the discussion owing to the fact 
 that some of these gentlemen started theorizing with 
 a sublime want of knowledge of the inner conditions 
 of workshops. The line of cleavage between them 
 and the craftsmen was almost immediate. “We must 
 have good conditions in large shops which we can 
 control,” said the former. To which the latter replied 
 “We can’t do our work in large shops under the 
 conditions you impose.” “Then,” said the others, 
 “rather than forego the good conditions at which we 
 aim, the Crafts had better perish.” “That means,” 
 said the craftsmen, “ perish standard and all hope of 
 it.” They insisted that a state which could make no 
 provision for the Arts & Crafts was not worth fighting 
 for, and they added the not unnatural implication that 
 they were not interested in a state in which they 
 themselves were going to be extinguished. It is 
 difficult, sometimes impossible, for the craftsman to 
 explain to the outsider why the surroundings of the 
 big shop are uncongenial to craftsmanship. I will 
 endeavour to make it a little clearer. The illustra- 
 tions I took before to show how the bad shop brings 
 106 
 
down the good, were taken from the Press, the 
 Hammerman and the Jeweller, they might equally 
 have been taken from any other of the shops con- 
 ducted by the Guild of Handicraft, or from the 
 multitude of building operations. If my readers will 
 turn to Appendix IV. they will see I give there four 
 representative cost sheets of work carried out in the 
 shop of the Blacksmith, the Joiner, the Silversmith 
 and the Jeweller. Each of these sheets represents 
 the costing up of a piece of good craftsmanship,, 
 conscientiously done under good and healthgiving 
 conditions, with interest, skill, and tradition on the 
 part of the craftsman. But now I will ask the reader 
 to apply to these four pieces the industrial method. 
 He shall say to himself there is money in this if I 
 can reduce the price. What happens ? The process 
 is as follows. A “ line ” has to be made in each 
 article, this means that instead of one, there will be 
 twenty, fifty or five hundred of each made; the article 
 is standardized. Special machinery has to be prepared 
 to make it, costs have to be reduced all round, sub- 
 division of labour has to be introduced all round, with 
 the result that the special skill and invention disappears,, 
 and instead of four good craftsmen knowing their 
 trade thoroughly, forty or fifty partially skilled or 
 completely unskilled “hands” are produced at lower 
 rates of wages, and down comes Standard. Nor does 
 the mischief stop here. Honest working conditions 
 in the country can no longer be observed, for 
 economy we must concentrate in the nearest great 
 town, we overcrowd, we have unsanitary con- 
 ditions and we have finally to saddle our 
 
 production with an immense staff of clerics, 
 accountants, salesmen, and black coated gentlemen 
 generally, who all of them plead that they too must 
 live. “Je n’en vois pas la necessite,” says my crafts- 
 
 107 
 
man, and he shuts up his shop, there being an end of 
 Standard for him whether of work or life. 
 
 Perhaps the answer still is, may it not be better to 
 multiply these things cheaply in order to give the 
 consumer more ? If so, had not the Craftsman better 
 go ? To which the reply appears to be : These 
 things are not in themselves worth having, they are 
 only worth having in so far as the conditions of life 
 they induce are good conditions. If we induce 
 through them the unsanitary, uneducated, uncultured 
 conditions of life of our great towns, we are better 
 without the things, for they become by the nature of 
 their production mere luxuries. And if the economic 
 Socialist still argues, “ Oh, but I propose to have 
 healthy, clean, well regulated factories wherein to 
 make the things,” the retort of the Craftsman is 
 “They cannot be so made, because my way of making 
 them is an individual and personal way which is not 
 possible for me if I am to be regulated, controlled, 
 my labour sub-divided and my work moulded into 
 lines such as is essential for the running of your 
 great factories.” 
 
 My last proposition is a necessary deduction from the 
 foregoing, it is the limitation of machinery and the 
 decentralization of the great towns. For it comes 
 to this, that if we accept the proposition that, certain 
 forms of production, for convenience called the Arts and 
 Crafts, are better reserved for the hand, and if the 
 shops in which they are made have to be protected, 
 then the machine production which threatens their 
 stability and destroys their standard must be regulated 
 and checked. 
 
 My experience in the many shops with which I 
 have had to do has shown me hundreds of different 
 ways in which this can and should be done, but I am 
 not here concerned with the details, as they apply in 
 108 
 
different trades. I wish rather to establish the 
 principle that is implied in the need for maintaining 
 Standard. If this principle is once accepted in each 
 trade or group of trades, the details of the limitation 
 of each mechanical industry will instantly present 
 themselves for solution and be solved. 
 
 But the limitation, or rather let us call it regulation, 
 of Machinery in the interest of the Arts and Crafts 
 will have far-reaching consequences, for it will of 
 itself imply a large measure of decentralization. Just 
 as Machinery has brought centralization of Industry, 
 so the withdrawing from the province of Industry of 
 all those forms of production which are better done 
 by hand will have the result of making it possible for 
 those things to be done in country districts. I am 
 aware that this proposal of mine for the limitation of 
 the province of the machine will be received by the 
 majority of educated, intellectual and scientific people, 
 the professional and well-to-do classes generally, as, 
 little short of madness, certainly as quixotic. But a 
 long acquaintance with practical workmen, their 
 thoughts and ways of looking at things, convinces 
 me that it is inevitable. “When we do get the 
 control of Industry,” a workman once said quite 
 simply at a Fabian meeting, “we are not only going 
 to say what the wages of work are going to be, we 
 shall say what the things are that we shall work at,” 
 and in that simple and naive determination, the bulk 
 of the wasteful and useless things of life will be swept 
 away. In my view, the limitation of machinery will 
 not come so much by direct regulation from above, 
 it will come from down below by way of rising 
 wages, by way of state or municipal aid to the valu- 
 able and life-giving occupations, and so little by little 
 the wasteful and useless and harmful things will 
 become less possible, and the machines that make 
 
 109 
 
them, being themselves unprofitable, will fall out of 
 use, because it will be worth nobody’s while to run 
 them.* The carrying out of the suggestions I made 
 in the last Chapter, for the encouragement of crafts- 
 manship would have the effect of strengthening the 
 crafts in their competition with the machines, but so 
 to the detriment of the latter, that many of the 
 machine industries would tend to be extinguished, 
 and the men engaged in them would probably turn 
 to more useful occupations, and start learning their 
 crafts once again. 
 
 I have entitled this Chapter “ the essential need of 
 Standard and its protection ; ” twenty-one years 
 experience in the workshops have brought me gradually 
 to the conclusion that the maintenance of Standard in 
 modern Industry is not permanently possible within 
 the workshops themselves ; and to this I add the con- 
 viction that craftsmanship and indeed national life 
 require that we should as a community recognise its 
 essential need once again, and since we cannot find it 
 within the workshops we must as of old set up an 
 authority whereby we shall find it outside. And how 
 is this to be done ? The direction in which we must 
 move constructively has already been indicated in 
 previous chapters : it may be well to recapitulate. 
 
 These constructive proposals of ours towards the re- 
 habilitation of Standard group themselves under three 
 heads : (a) the development of voluntary associations ; 
 (b) direct government or municipal legislation on 
 behalf of the Arts and Crafts ; (c) general as apart from 
 specific legislation, such legislation as is sometimes 
 called socialistic, but which has for its objective the 
 
 * I was told recently at High Wycombe that the American machine 
 for reduplicating carving , an intrinsically worthless machine , 
 was no longer profitable in the better shops. 
 
 I IO 
 
general regulation of Industry in the interest of the 
 whole community. 
 
 Under the first heading we should place the greater 
 union and organization of Artists and Craftsmen among 
 themselves, such as will enable them to act more 
 together and independent of commercial influences, a 
 greater development of bodies like the Art Workers’ 
 Guild, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, the 
 Royal Institute of British Architects and such of the 
 Trade Unions as touch by the nature of their organiza- 
 tion upon the question of Standard. 
 
 Under the second, we should place a more intelligent 
 government support and interest in questions of Art 
 and Craft, such as is wisely accorded in countries like 
 Germany, France, Austria, Hungary. A more 
 liberal application of the principles of copyright and 
 registration in cases where they are of service to the 
 Arts and Crafts, assistance to 'the voluntary societies 
 in the matter of exhibitions, grants of land and per- 
 manent buildings and so forth, and also the licensing 
 of small workshops, perhaps through the medium of 
 the voluntary societies. 
 
 Under the last head we should set all such aids to 
 production as may be definitely shown to be common 
 to all its forms alike, state education, the reform of 
 the land laws, state pensions for old age, and above 
 all and most important of all the establishment of 
 the principle of the minimum wage, which is to be 
 the chief means of stamping out cheap labour. The 
 Principle of the minimum wage mav be said to be 
 the obverse of the medal of which Standard is the 
 token head : but this leads us to certain international 
 and racial aspects of Standard which I will consider 
 in the next Chapter. 
 
 1 1 1 
 
CHAPTER X. ON THE WIDER NATIONAL 
 ASPECTS OF STANDARD. 
 
 It is not part of my object to show what are to be 
 the practical means by which we shall obtain the 
 minimum wage, that is only the concern of the Arts, 
 and Crafts in so far as the recognition of the general 
 principle is concerned. How to carry the principle 
 out is the problem of every trade or group of trades ; 
 and to show how it could be done in such specific 
 trades as I am intimate with, would take us into a 
 multitude of detail with which it would be out of 
 place here to deal. All that need now be said is 
 that the soundness of the principle of the minimum 
 wage, — a very different matter from its practical 
 establishment, — may be taken for granted. Just as 
 it is accepted and recognised now as an essential 
 principle in all the higher forms of labour, so it 
 must and will in the future be equally recognised 
 in all forms of labour. It is recognised among 
 lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, teachers, architects, 
 there is no reason why it should not be equally recog- 
 nised and enforced in all avocations. Its inevitable 
 corollary is the reform and industrialization of the 
 prison system, for if a man will not work, neither 
 shall he eat, but with that aspect of the question we 
 are not here concerned. 
 
 My object in this Chapter is not as it has been in the 
 other chapters to lay down proposals of a constructive 
 nature, but assuming those already set forth to be 
 sound, to show their bearing upon wider national and 
 international questions, and to suggest directions in 
 which we may have to modify our current generali- 
 zations concerning international problems, Free Trade, 
 
 1 12 
 
tariff reform, questions of race, colour and creed. I 
 wish also to point to the inadequacy of the official 
 programme* of English Socialism in its bearing upon 
 these larger issues as it has been so far presented to us. 
 Socialism for those who labour in the Arts & Crafts 
 is only possible of acceptance as a working hypothesis 
 if it recognises and determines Standard, and we 
 craftsmen hold that upon the determination of the 
 principle of Standard the Socialistic state must really 
 hinge. Get Standard accepted, Standard of work 
 and life, produce only the good things and the good 
 men and women, and then will that sound economic 
 basis which is postulated in the socialistic state be 
 secured. The socialistic state indeed cannot be built 
 upon a worthless output either of things or of men.ff 
 Now if Socialism is the first, Tariff Reform is the 
 second of the forces that have cut across the lines of 
 English political philosophy in our own time, Tariff 
 Reform has also a close bearing upon the principle of 
 Standard implied in the Arts & Crafts and emphasized 
 in the last Chapter. Tariff Reform is an instinctive 
 recognition of the fact that the commercial system has 
 found its limitations, that other countries are now 
 going to produce for themselves, which will mean the 
 closing of old markets, and that expansion on the lines 
 of new markets in unopened countries is no longer 
 possible, because there will soon be none left to open, 
 
 * See “ Fabianism and the Fiscal Question” 1904. 
 
 t If it be asked here how we should define Socialism , the 
 ordinary economic definition as given by the Fabian Society would 
 suffice for purposes of argument, though I personally prefer a 
 definition of wider ethical bearing , 1 therefore 0 filer my own 
 definition , as given in “ Socialism and Politics,” piiblished 1906, 
 “ Socialism is a faith whose objective is the betterment of society, 
 which objective it is sought to arrive at through a more equitable 
 distribution, based upon a more collective production of wealth, 
 and the sanction for which rests upon scientific, historic and 
 ethic. 1 1 principles ! 5 
 
 1 13 
 
 H 
 
and that in consequence a racial drawing together is 
 needed for the English speaking people.* 
 
 The limitation of markets is, one of the reasons given 
 for Tariff Reform, but the answer of the Craftsman, 
 as of the Socialist, must be, that the elimination of the 
 bad commodity and the improvement of its type, i.e. 
 Standard, is the corollary to the limitation of markets. 
 Upon the basis of Standard, Tariff Reform will become 
 not only possible, but essential, because it will indi- 
 vidualize commodities, give them national and racial 
 character, draw them little by little out of the sphere 
 of economic or non-moral competition. 
 
 There is a point however at which the craftsman, 
 every worker in non-mechanical industry and all those 
 who are injured by machinery, must part company 
 with the economic Socialist. That point is un- 
 mistakably emphasized by Mr. Bernard Shaw in the 
 Fabian manifesto on Tariff Reform. The Society’s 
 reply to the Tariff Reform proposals is up to that 
 point convincing. “ All we have to do,” it says, “ is 
 to meet foreign competition by improving our methods 
 up to the limit of possibility.” So far so good, but 
 now follows the root fallacy of the Collectivist 
 argument as applied to Tariff Reform. “ If,” says 
 the manifesto, “ we are then surpassed in economy of 
 production for any reason whatever, we can surrender 
 the industry without regret, and make ourselves 
 dependent on other nations for it.” What is economy 
 of production ? The fallacy is in confusing economy 
 of production with cheapness, even when obtained by 
 the most perfect factory organization, and based upon 
 the principle of the minimum wage. Economy of 
 production has nothing to do with cheapness, it is 
 that production which most economises and at the 
 
 * See Mr. Balfour 3 s pamphlet on The Fiscal Question . 
 
same time most encourages the finest faculties of men, 
 their highest skill, their choicest imagination and 
 invention, their finest physique. We craftsmen hold 
 that economy of production is at stake under the factory 
 system whether conducted upon Individualist or upon 
 Collectivist lines, and if it can be shown, that economy 
 of production is at stake under the best appointed 
 factory system at home, the argument applies with 
 equal force as against the factory system abroad, and 
 its effect upon the home market. 
 
 The difficulty will, it seems to me, have to be met 
 by a division of the industries into basic and personal, 
 with which I deal in a later chapter, and by frankly 
 recognising that machinery may be infinitely developed 
 in the former, while it must be regulated or controlled 
 in the interests of the latter. If this be done at home, 
 it is obvious that for the maintenance of Standard 
 the cheap or unregulated machine product must be 
 kept out, or at least taxed up to a point at which it 
 does not destroy the personal product. Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw does not mince matters. “ If,” says he, “ the 
 future Russia or America builds all the ships in 
 Europe, manufactures all the house fittings, makes 
 all the hardware and soft goods, and, in short, as far 
 as the ordinary every-day commodities of civilization 
 are concerned, reduces the rest of the world to the 
 dependence of a Rothschild, whilst the other nations 
 emulate one another in scientific and learned handi- 
 crafts* or headicrafts,T the only party to the transac- 
 tion who need complain of having the worst of the 
 bargain will be Russia or America as the case may be.” 
 
 * What are “ learned handicrafts” ! Fine fur7iiture\ smithing y 
 good silver work) well-printed books l All handicrafts it takes 
 years to learn. 
 
 7 And “ headier aftsf what are these ! ( I don't know the word!) 
 
 Plays'! economical and statistical inquiries! 
 
 1 1 5 
 
 H 2 
 
The learned handicrafts, as we craftsmen understand 
 them, cannot be pursued as I have already shown in 
 the previous Chapter under the conditions offered by 
 the Collectivist State. And that being so we crafts- 
 men tell the Fabians their State is not going to work. 
 H ow indeed can it if they deprive the majority of its 
 men and women of the possibility of attaining these 
 higher things, those very things which Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw wishes to retain. The majority of men and 
 women work better with their hands than with 
 their heads, and that is why a Collectivism which does 
 not separate the personal from the basic industries, 
 the non-mechanical from the mechanical, is doomed 
 to failure. It is a one-sided view of life, this that the 
 Fabian Socialist has so far evolved, and we Craftsmen 
 cannot accept it. We wish to put our imagination, 
 our skill, our character, our very selves into our work, 
 even if it be “ house fittings, hardware, and soft goods,” 
 or as Mr. Bernard Shaw has it “ the ordinary every- 
 day commodities of civilization," and we want to 
 make of this work of ours just as good a job as Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw makes of his plays, or Mr. Sidney Webb 
 of his books. 
 
 That being so the principle of Standard must be con- 
 sidered as well as the principle of the minimum wage. 
 The two sides of the medal must be looked at in 
 relation to each other. Tariff Reform therefore, if it 
 take the form of a protection of Standard, is the in- 
 evitable corollary of a Socialism that recognizes and 
 does not ignore the Arts and Crafts. But here the 
 -question of Standard assumes its international impor- 
 tance ; in this “ If” there is a great qualification, for 
 if the principles underlying Arts and Crafts are true 
 for us, they are true for all foreign countries, & these 
 principles are summed up in the opening sentence of 
 our first Chapter, — the making of useful things, 
 1 16 
 
the making of them well and beautiful \ goodness 
 and beauty are one and the same. To this end 
 it is in the interest of every country that recognizes 
 and acts on them, to make these things for itself and 
 not as the Fabian manifesto proposes — to make itself 
 dependent upon other countries for them. The 
 Socialist Free Trade position, in short, as outlined in the 
 Fabian manifesto, brings us to a reductioad absurdum ; 
 by omitting the Arts and Crafts, it ignores Standard, 
 and so defeats its own end of “ economy of production” 
 in the highest sense. By its inability to distinguish 
 between what is basic and what is personal in human 
 production, it intensifies the root evils of machinery, 
 it still leaves us in the position of the mysterious rich 
 person beyond the realms of Prester John — dependent 
 for the essentials of life upon others. 
 
 There is, however, still a way of looking at things, 
 the way that might be called' that of the “ Socialist 
 Tariff Reformer ” rather than that of the “ Socialist 
 Free Trader.” The Fabian is right when he says 
 that protective duties on imports are not going to 
 help us, but assuming the principle of the minimum 
 wage, a Tariff on the basis of Standard, is a very 
 different proposition. Such a Tariff, it appears to 
 me, would offer a reasonable way of looking at the 
 question internationally, for it would imply that each 
 nation should have its own Standard, and such Tariff 
 wall as it set up would be set up from the point of 
 view not of taxing or keeping out goods, but of 
 letting them in, provided their Standard was up to 
 that of the home product & did not interfere with 
 the conditions of the life of the home producer. 
 This way of looking at the problem is economically 
 sound, because it recognizes the fundamental principle 
 of exchange as implied in Free Trade, and it com- 
 bines with this the fundamental principle of the 
 
 i 1 7 
 
minimum wage as laid down by the Socialists, and the 
 fundamental principle of Standard as implied in the 
 Arts and Crafts. 
 
 Let us look into the matter a little more closely. It 
 is true that the question is wanting in actuality, be- 
 cause the causes that militate against the maintenance 
 of Standard under modern Industrial conditions, are 
 deeper than any question of Free Trade or Protection, 
 for the degradation of Standard is as acute in Pro- 
 tected as it is in Free Trade Countries. It is safe, 
 therefore, to say that the abandonment of Free Trade 
 in England or its introduction into the United States 
 or Germany would not, as far as we can at present 
 see, affect the question one way or the other. The 
 real trouble lies deeper. If we accept the Free Trade 
 axiom, as indeed we must, that Trade is exchange, 
 we picture to ourselves a big fair or bazaar, England 
 let us say is displaying her wares. At one part of 
 her exhibition are her great ships, her machinery, 
 her engines, in another her cotton and woollen goods, 
 in another her works of Art and Craft, in another her 
 sweated industries, the filthy stuff from Whitechapel, 
 Bow, Stratford, the rotten building materials, the 
 rotten silver from Birmingham, the rotten furniture 
 from Curtain Road and fligh Wycombe, the rotten 
 cutlery from Sheffield. The foreigner comes to buy, 
 one offers corn and wine, another Persian carpets, 
 another tea, and they take in exchange our ships, our 
 cheap cottons, our sweated matches. If we allow 
 these things to be produced, exchange continues upon 
 the line of production permitted. 
 
 But now we are proposing, by our acceptance of the 
 principle of the minimum wage and the principle of 
 Standard, to allow only good English work to be 
 exchanged in our fair ; obviously then if Gresham’s 
 law applies, that the bad commodity drives out the 
 1 1 8 
 
good, the foreign cheap commodity must be put 
 under some sort of restriction. It is clear that if 
 Standard cannot be maintained without protection at 
 home it cannot ultimately be maintained where free 
 exchange of commodities exists. The reason for this 
 lies in the varying climatic and social conditions of 
 the different peoples, their characters, civilizations, 
 customs, and the fact that the standard of life in one 
 country differs from that in another. The Japanese 
 craftsman eats rice ; the English craftsman meat ; 
 the Egyptian felaheen, the Hindoo ryat and the 
 African Kaffir, they all of them practise different 
 forms of handicraft, they are all potential “ machine 
 operatives,” but they all have different conceptions 
 as to the standard of life. It is in the question of 
 Standard that we find both the argument for and 
 the answer to the doctrine of Free Trade, under- 
 stood as Free Imports, a doctrine that is both true 
 and false in accordance with the values we attach 
 to life. The reverse or tail of our medal of Standard 
 is the minimum wage, — the minimum amount 
 tipon which the life of an English Citizen 
 can or should be supported. A tariff for the pro- 
 tection of Standard thus consistently carried out by 
 all countries, or, let us say, by one country and then 
 another, would give us the really vital thing in Free 
 Trade, for it would not only give room but encourage 
 the interchange among races of what they can best 
 yield, and it would lead to those finer expressions of 
 national and racial individuality which the Arts and 
 Crafts imply. 
 
 This aspect of the problem has in it considerations 
 of deep social significance, questions that involve our 
 colonial and imperial development, our existence as 
 a people. It affects closely our relationship not only 
 to the peoples within the British Empire, but also 
 
 1 19 
 
all those other peoples upon whom our economic 
 system directly acts, the peoples to whom we lend 
 capital, or whom we exploit. If, as the socialistic 
 economists say, it is the fact of absenteeism in capital 
 and land that is going to bring about their gradual 
 absorption by the community, then this will have a 
 world-wide application, and it will bear in varying 
 degree upon peoples of varying forms and grades of 
 civilization. The development of the socialistic 
 state, in other words, will lead to two important 
 things, it will lead first to the recognition of the 
 Standards of other peoples, and secondly to the 
 checking and even shrinkage of foreign trade 
 markets, with their inevitable adjunct, militant 
 imperialism. And it would imply more than this 
 again, for the expropriation by the English working 
 classes of capital at home, would mean that as far as 
 foreign investments were concerned, the labourer in 
 Argentina, in Egypt, in India, wherever the Invest- 
 ment might happen to be, would become tributary 
 to an English working class State instead of to 
 bodies of individual shareholders as at present. It is 
 inevitable that the same movements that make for 
 Standard of life in one country will tell in all 
 countries, therefore a mutual recognition of Standard 
 is likely to follow. 
 
 This is where enters the great idea of English inter- 
 colonial union, loosely implied in Tariff Reform, the 
 real objective of which is to set a racial Standard of 
 life ; this idea has little connection with international 
 Capitalism, though great Capitalists may hold it, and 
 it is fundamentally opposed to the exploitation of 
 coloured labour within the bounds over which the 
 race Standard shall be made to apply. 
 
 Now it is a part of our British arrogance and insularity 
 always to assume that any new idea that dawns upon 
 1 20 
 
us is ours alone, and that other peoples cannot possibly 
 share or think it with us. The idea of racial evolu- 
 tion & racial Standard however is one that is gradually 
 taking shape all over the world. The Latin 
 world has long ago appreciated its significance ; for 
 the Teutonic world it was expressed by Bismarck ; 
 we see it in Pan Slavism, we see it in the aspirations 
 of the Magyar, it is the root difficulty of the colour 
 problem in the United States, we see it in the 
 Swadeshi movement in India, it has received its fullest 
 modern expression in the Japanese national ideal of 
 Bushido. And the inference we may draw from this 
 is that cosmopolitanism is receding in importance as 
 a political force as the national idea gathers strength. 
 The great cosmopolitan movements are likely in the 
 future to have influence primarily through national 
 channels. As cosmopolitanism recedes, so with it 
 will recede those world ideas- which from time to 
 time have touched the peoples, the universalism of 
 the French Revolution, the militant Christianity, the 
 English conception of Free Trade as a universal idea. 
 Now Socialism is also one of the cosmopolitan ideas, 
 therefore the Socialist State of the future will, it seems, 
 be national before it can be cosmopolitan, and the 
 Standard that each state shapes for itself, while 
 influenced by all the others, will primarily be its own 
 Standard. But the fact of the cosmopolitanism 
 receding need not mean that the larger ideas will be 
 kept from sight ; the passage through the channel 
 may get us quicker, nearer to our end, and it may 
 yield an interpretation of the ethical ideal through a 
 medium of our own race, language, and hereditary 
 training, which we can the better understand. We 
 shall get to the greater cosmopolitanism again, when 
 the races have been trained to see each others value, 
 have touched each others ethics and thought, have 
 
come to the knowledge of each others relation 
 through modern scientific Truth. 
 
 At this point then we may be said to be upon bed- 
 rock in our considerations of Standard, and if we ask 
 ourselves the question : how comes it that we as a 
 people have lost our conception of Standard ? all we 
 can answer is, because we have lost, for the time being,’ 
 our religion. We have lost hold and footing of the 
 ethical basis upon which standard of life and standard 
 of production must ultimately rest ; we have allowed 
 to slip out of our legislation those ethical rules upon 
 which we as a Christian people were once nourished; 
 we have assumed that the individual left free of restraint 
 was able to restrain himself, and the individual has not 
 been strong enough, not been Christian enough to do 
 so. A new power has been put into his hand by 
 industrial machinery and he has abused it. He needs 
 once more the rod of discipline and this is what 
 Socialism is bringing him ; we need not be afraid of 
 this rod if we believe in the Christian ethic we 
 profess. Constantly do we disguise from ourselves 
 the fact that the fundamental teachings of Christianity, 
 not necessarily of the Churches and the missionaries, 
 but of Christianity, are akin to the teachings of 
 Socialism, that the latter can indeed be shown histori- 
 cally to be an outcome and expression of the former ; 
 and we are also coming to see the further fact that the 
 scientific basis of the latter is broadening. What is 
 giving to the socialistic propoganda its enormous 
 impetus at the beginning of our century is not only 
 that it represents a reaction against the anti-religious, 
 the materialistic view of life held in the Victorian age, 
 but that science in its more modern developments, 
 biology, medicine, sociology, economics, has in 
 becoming less negative and more synthetic thrown its 
 weight into the cause of social reconstruction. This 
 122 
 
ethical foothold then, which we have lost, we must 
 regain, and the doing of this is largely the objective 
 of Socialism understood as an idealistic and not merely 
 as an economic movement ; but the Socialists them- 
 selves have much to learn. 
 
 Here then we must for the time being leave our 
 subject, for it is other races, other peoples, other 
 religions that must, in helping themselves, help us ; 
 races perhaps whose standards of life and whose Arts 
 and Crafts we are at present through our Industrialispi 
 destroying.* The Standards of one race we know 
 may be higher and finer than the Standards of 
 another ; all we can say of other races again 
 is that their Standards are different from ours, 
 perhaps neither higher nor lower, only different. It 
 is mere midsummer madness for us to assume that 
 Japan, and China, and India for instance, each with 
 their centuries of civilization and culture will not in 
 the end maintain and develop their own standards 
 independently of us and ours ; for at bottom this 
 question of Standard is a question of ethics, and it is 
 determined by national idealism and national faiths. 
 Ages of religious development have helped shape and 
 mould it, & the study of comparative religions shows 
 our Standards to have been shaped for us just as theirs 
 have been for them, by the faith behind. 
 
 But in the last 50 years there has entered into our 
 Western consideration of Standard a new factor. 
 There has come the knowledge that behind our con- 
 ception of good and evil, of right and wrong, stands 
 a power, inscrutable, irresistible, continually moving, 
 that tells us human nature is not fixed, and that may 
 
 * An interesting illustration of this , one out of many that could 
 be given , is the destruction of the Indian Standards of Crafts- 
 manship and, life through the introduction of British Free 
 Trade, see Sir Geo. Birdwood on “ Industrial Arts of India f 
 If 64 1880 . 
 
at any moment, as we ourselves change, change for 
 us our Standards, the power that the Greeks discovered 
 to be behind Zeus, the power that so often reveals 
 itself to man’s intelligence at those moments in human 
 thought, a moment such as we are in, when the old 
 Gods give way to the new. Our Western conceptions 
 of Standard are still determined for us by the old Gods, 
 constructive Socialism is about to change them, but 
 only within the limitations laid down by modern 
 science, that dark 5 avayicrj moving irrestibly behind 
 what we suppose to be the will of Heaven. 
 
 124 
 
CHAPTER XI. THE ARCHITECT & THE 
 CRAFTS. 
 
 These speculations in political philosophy whither 
 we were led in our last Chapter may seem to have 
 taken us from the immediate issues of our subject — 
 Craftsmanship in Competitive Industry ; and yet it 
 is not so, for our subject is one that is so deeply 
 entwined with national character that we cannot 
 properly understand its little touches of local 
 colour and detail, unless we are able also to envisage 
 it upon the greater canvas of national life. More- 
 over, as I have said before, the movement of the 
 Arts and Crafts is a part of the Idealistic movement 
 that is shaping our age ; and the comprehension of 
 its great purpose, Standard, is only possible where 
 the bearing of Standard upon national life is grasped. 
 I wish now to approach my subject from another 
 point of view, and again I trust constructively. 
 Having determined the meaning of Standard and laid 
 down certain propositions for its maintenance in the 
 Arts and Crafts generally, I want now to take the 
 occupation of the Architect and Builder, with which 
 I am more familiar than with any other, & show how 
 these propositions directly apply to that Craft and 
 could be carried out in it. 
 
 Architecture, £ the Mother Art/ which should be 
 guardian and helper to all the Arts and Crafts, has 
 through the agency of industrial machinery and the 
 contract system become in large measure the instru- 
 ment of their destruction— an evil mother, destroying 
 her little ones. Let us examine this ; and first let us 
 ask ourselves how this c looking within,’ which is so 
 deeply touching other forms of national life touches 
 
 125 
 
the architects. This idealistic movement which is 
 quietly changing the practical policy and the ethics 
 of so many thoughtful Englishmen, how is it affecting 
 the architectural profession ? There is very little sign 
 of its having as yet touched the profession ; some 
 dozen or so of the younger men are beginning to feel 
 and express it in their work, but for the profession as 
 a whole we can barely say that it is beginning to have 
 an awakened consciousness. Our profession, indeed, 
 is one of the most backward, one of the most unin- 
 telligent, and one of the most unorganized in the 
 country. We have carried among ourselves to its 
 logical & ignorant conclusion the principle of indivi- 
 dualism, with the result that there is no body or 
 group of bodies that stands in England for 
 architecture as a whole, or that can fairly speak for 
 every type and form of building ; still less any 
 body that has the sympathy of all practising archi- 
 tects or that can establish that Standard in building 
 for which c the profession ’ ought to have its being. 
 It is true there are many bodies that speak in one way 
 or another for the architects, but they have no 
 cohesion and no unity. There is the Royal Institute, 
 which professedly leads, there is the little group of 
 Royal Academician Architects, which has an official 
 glamour, there is the Society of Architects at war 
 with the Royal Institute, there is the Art Workers’ 
 Guild, which contains the majority of what are called 
 the “ Artist Architects,” and there is the Architectural 
 Association. All these bodies have more or less 
 conflicting interests, they overlap, they command a 
 varying suffrage, outside them there has been and 
 still is a very large percentage of men who have pre- 
 ferred to remain free lances because they feel that by 
 doing so they can better further not only their own 
 ends but perhaps the greater objects of Architecture. 
 
 126 
 
From top to bottom there is a state of hopeless dis- 
 organization, there is no objective, no idea, no guidance, 
 no control. As a consequence we architects are 
 powerless to do what we want to do, and what ought 
 to be done ; our powerlessness is the result of our 
 ignorance. And why should we disguise this ignor- 
 ance from ourselves ? Our ignorance is not one of 
 technical detail, it is much more serious than that ; it 
 is an ignorance of our right relationship to the 
 Community around us, and consequently of the work 
 we have got to do. We have never been educated 
 in these things, because there has been no school in 
 which to educate us. Trained in the old-fashioned 
 individualist office, each man for his little self, 
 specializing in one type of designing or another, 
 each man in his own little way, peddling about 
 “ four orders ” and ££ styles,” when we ought to have 
 been at the bench or on the works with the men, we 
 have none of us been able to form any conception of 
 the relationship of our own little bit to the greater 
 whole of the Community at large. The consequence 
 is that 75 per cent, of the work that should be ours, 
 the building of the Country, is being taken from us, 
 and we ourselves have drifted outside the economic 
 movement into a backwater of our own, a little back- 
 water upon which whenever the sun shines it lights 
 up some momentary, some placid reflection to which 
 we give a graceful name : ££ Neo-perpendicular,” 
 ££ Queen Anne,” ££ Georgian,” “ S.P.A.P.,” ££ L’Art 
 Nouveau,” or ££ Pure Commercial,” as the case may 
 be, each sparkles for an instant on the surface of our 
 little architectural pool. Any strong corporate in- 
 fluence or hold upon the building of the country we 
 have none, that has been taken from us by the jerry- 
 builder, the tradesman with a machine, the man who 
 does it cheap. By allowing the cheap to continue 
 
 t 27 
 
we are destroying the Arts and Crafts, and our own 
 work with them. 
 
 Now the object of this Chapter is to insist that 
 Architecture must once again be put into its right 
 place, and to show how if this is to be effected three 
 things must be done. 
 
 1. The profession must organize itself, and carry 
 
 out a consistent policy of Trades Unionism 
 and Standard. 
 
 2. It must define its position in relation to 
 
 industrial machinery and cheap labour on 
 the one hand, and to the Arts and Crafts 
 on the other. 
 
 3. It must procure greater powers from 
 
 Parliament or the municipalities for en- 
 forcing the maintenance of Standard. 
 
 In illustration of these three propositions I want to 
 give some instances of the way I have tried from time 
 to time with the workmen of the Guild of Handicraft 
 to put the principles of Standard and the right 
 limitation of machinery into practical force on different 
 buildings which we have handled together. There 
 is nothing like actual work upon buildings for 
 bringing one into touch with the realities of labour, 
 and the significance of machinery ; there is nothing 
 that so convincingly reveals to us the actual and 
 possible limitations of mechanical industry as work 
 upon the building itself. The architect who sits in 
 an office, makes drawings and specifications and 
 manipulates Committees, does not understand these 
 things, as does the architect who is on the building, 
 'striving to get at good work, and finding out why his 
 workmen cannot give it him. My first point of 
 insistence then is that the profession must come into 
 128 
 
line with the spirit of the times, must organize itself, 
 and carry through a consistent policy of Trade 
 Unionism and Standard. If the compulsory registra- 
 tion of architects is to mean anything it will mean : — 
 
 1. The full admission of the Trade Union 
 
 principle in its application to the whole 
 body of architects ; 
 
 2. That the State will allow no “ black legging ” 
 
 among members of the profession ; 
 
 3. That the profession by such compulsory 
 
 Trade Unionism will be giving a lead and 
 affording an example to all those trades and 
 crafts, each with their own Union, which 
 it is controlling and directing ; 
 
 4. That Standard in building will become the 
 
 objective of the profession as a whole instead 
 of only a few men who have been specially 
 interested in the art of their subject. 
 
 By such a pulling together the profession will be 
 seriously and as a whole grappling with the question 
 of Competitive Industry in its bearing upon Archi- 
 tecture. This fantastic, stupid, unregulated competi- 
 tion, which is destroying the crafts because it makes 
 the maintenance of Standard impossible, is cutting 
 into the very vitals of Architecture and Building. 
 Thousands of cases could be adduced to show how 
 the work of the architect and the builder is being 
 taken away from them by those who are entirely 
 ignorant of the needs of the craft, but who happen 
 to have got control of some machinery for the 
 manufacture of one commodity or other. The 
 position here is identical with that of the Birming- 
 ham silversmith shops to which I referred in 
 
 129 
 
 J 
 
Chapter IX. Steam joinery firms in Sweden, corru- 
 gated iron makers in Wolverhampton, concrete 
 cement makers, manufacturers or exploiters of every 
 conceivable untried commodity do now, provided 
 they have enough capital behind them to control 
 reduplication, compete with the architect and the 
 builder and bring down the standard he may be 
 trying to keep up. I will give an instance, one 
 of many I could give, to show how the process 
 works. 
 
 A gentleman, an Anglo-Indian officer, came to me 
 recently, and wanted a little house built in one of 
 the most beautiful spots in England. He was short 
 of money, short of time, and short of taste, but 
 quite willing to be guided in the right way. Un- 
 fortunately, however, he had seen an advertisement 
 of some firms that called themselves “ bungalow 
 builders,” and who notified to all and sundry who 
 happened to be building that they would be saved 
 25 per cent, by coming to them. My hypothetical 
 client put the case before me and showed me the 
 specifications, plans and prices of two manufacturing 
 firms, one in Norwich, another in Macclesfield, each 
 of which undertook to “ supply in sections and 
 deliver to date.” One of the firms even offered to 
 send down “ our architect” to advise as to the 
 Art. I cubed the plans up at what they would 
 cost to build with local materials at local building 
 prices, and I found that they worked out at 
 just about the same amount as the tenders of the 
 “ bungalow builders ; ” for labour in the Country was 
 cheap owing to want of employment. This seemed 
 to me hopeful, but then my friend said — “ These 
 Bungalow Builders offer to deliver at a price, 
 and to a date, will you do likewise ? ” In other 
 words would I give him an undertaking to make good 
 130 
 
out of my fee as architect any extras in the builder’s 
 bill over a certain sum. I declined, and one of the 
 finest sites in England, among thatched cottages and 
 farmsteads where there is the loveliest building 
 material, was threatened with an irruption of sectional 
 half timber in the manner of the Swiss Cottage and 
 the railway station, with a touch of L’Art Nouveau 
 thrown in, — just such a little touch, as the young 
 draughtsman on 30/- a week who drew the Bungalows 
 in question may have learned in evening classes at 
 Macclesfield or Norwich. 
 
 Now we may reasonably claim not only that the public, 
 but the client and the Craft could and should be 
 protected from this sort of thing, and that it is the 
 duty of the Architectural profession to see that the 
 protection is found. The finding of it leads me to my 
 second proposition, viz., that the profession must 
 determine its position in relation to machinery and 
 cheap labour on the one hand and the Arts & Crafts 
 on the other. 
 
 Let us take our Anglo Indian once again. For my 
 part, I consider that my potential client, limited as he 
 was in cash, time and taste, had a perfect right to bind 
 me to a date, and limit me to cost ; but with the 
 machines of Macclesfield and Norwich against me I 
 could not possibly compete as to the former, and the 
 risk was unfair as to the latter. What the individual 
 architect cannot do however, the whole body of the 
 profession might do, i.e. } give security to the client 
 for the fulfilment of a contract. The aesthetic 
 question, the question of taste, of beauty, of style, of 
 tradition, this all is involved in the ethical and 
 economic considerations upon which we have to con- 
 centrate. About these aesthetic questions we need not 
 concern ourselves, they are like all Art,- — by the way; 
 it is unfair to expect an understanding of them from 
 
 131 
 
an Anglo Indian officer in a hurry, or from a manu- 
 facturing firm in Norwich or Macclesfield, whose sole 
 object is to dispose annually of so many thousand half 
 timber sections. /Esthetics we may leave to the 
 producers themselves, they will find the way out, 
 provided we first take away the economic handicap 
 that is destroying them and crippling their power of 
 individual production. Our problem as a body of 
 practical men is an ethical one at bottom , for here 
 again practical economics rest upon ethics. Our 
 problem is Standard, the right and wrong in the Craft, 
 the limitations of its boundaries, the understanding of 
 its duties and rights. 
 
 We are, as architects, now that the full significance 
 of the Gothic revival has worked itself out and 
 revealed itself, gradually learning to appreciate the 
 economic meaning of the regulations made by the 
 mediaeval builders, and how they bore upon work. 
 In the deed drawn up in 1356 by the London 
 Builders and binding upon all, there is a clause by 
 which when contracts were undertaken, their fulfil- 
 ment was guaranteed by the craft in whole or part. 
 When the craft is thus tied, in other words a “ close 
 profession,” as it would be by compulsory registration, 
 such an obviously sound principle could be easily 
 carried through in our own day. 
 
 This question of collective or mutual guarantee is a 
 very far reaching one, because it bears upon the 
 humbler work of architecture, upon the little house, 
 and hence upon the average need of the Community. 
 As every architect knows, it is comparatively easy to 
 make the large contracts, where there is plenty of 
 margin, come out right ; the difficulty is with the 
 small ones. Perhaps one of the greatest questions 
 before the country at this moment, is the question of 
 housing for the working classes, in town and country 
 132 
 
alike ; in other words how to build Cottages in the 
 country and streets in the towns. At first sight it 
 seems as if that were a question which we architects 
 should solve ; are we solving it ? By no means. As 
 a profession we do not touch the problem, as indi- 
 viduals we may build a street here, a cottage there, & 
 then we find that we have to cease our work because 
 we cannot as architects make it economically possible.* 
 We cannot get our prices down to the prices of the 
 tradesmen who are undercutting us. The obvious 
 remedy is for us to get those prices controlled and 
 regulated, in other words to do away with the cheap 
 commodity and the cheap labour which is making 
 those prices possible and bringing down our Standard. 
 Now this is a problem of practical economics ; 
 applied to architecture, it leads to conclusions, the 
 steps to which can only be taken by the Architects 
 themselves, and it should be the duty, the business & 
 the privilege of the Architects as a whole to take these 
 steps, to advise and guide the municipalities, & bodies 
 like the Fabian Society, or other forces who are 
 influencing legislation. There should, it seems to me, 
 be an economic Sub-Committee not only of the 
 Royal Institute, but of every one of its affiliated 
 societies in every provincial town for rhe direct 
 purpose of raising Standard from below as well as 
 influencing it from above. This would very soon guide 
 the profession into defining its relation to machine 
 production and cheap labour ; while the defining of 
 its position towards the Arts and Crafts would follow 
 as a natural consequence; it would inevitably lead to 
 its dealing with such questions as the clearing of 
 slums, the shifting of taxation from house property, 
 
 * See my “ Book of Cottages aiid little Houses, for Landlords, 
 Architects , Builders and others ” published [Bats ford) 1906, 
 where this subject has been exhaustively dealt with . 
 
 133 
 
*34 
 
 Village Hall in Somerset reconstructed on the Guild system , not the Contract system 
 
135 
 
 The same showing a portion of the interior. 
 
all of which are vital to Architecture but about 
 which the profession at present does not concern 
 itself. 
 
 Our third proposition follows as inevitably. The 
 profession as a whole must obtain from Parliament 
 and the municipalities, greater power for enforcing 
 the maintenance of Standard. When it has found 
 out to its own satisfaction where the unfair and waste- 
 ful competition operates, it must obtain powers for 
 limiting it. Powers “ in restraint of trade,” that is 
 what we need, just as lawyers, doctors, dentists, mid- 
 wives, and others have such powers now, so for the 
 sake of Standard the architects will need to have them 
 too. It is the other great mediaeval Guild principle 
 th is, that went with the principle of mutual guarantee , 
 the principle known to the Guilds as the right of 
 search. It is only when the profession is united 
 within itself that it will be able to act for itself no 
 longer, because it will then identify itself with the 
 whole Community, and when it is in this position it 
 will act as an arm of the Community, not as a body 
 of mutually competing units as at present. 
 
 Now here are our three propositions, and if an attempt 
 were made by the profession to carry them through 
 we should soon find ourselves passing out of the 
 present system of competitive contract into another. 
 This other system we may for convenience sake call 
 the Guild system. I would like to show more fully 
 what is meant by this and how it would and indeed 
 already does bear upon Architecture. Let us look 
 for a minute at that strange and complex jargon of 
 slipshod English known as the Architect’s specification. 
 In theory it represents his instructions to the different 
 workmen, it amplifies his plan and drawings, it is 
 arranged on traditional lines under the heading of ten 
 or twelve affiliated Crafts that go to make up building, 
 136 
 
A Church in Essex partly Rebuilt under the Guild system as 
 distinct from the Contract system. 
 
 157 
 
the mason, bricklayer, carpenter, plumber, plasterer, 
 glazier, smith, painter, and so forth ; that is the 
 theory. In practice the document is quite different, 
 its chief import is its checking of the contractor. It 
 is a sort of lordly instruction to the financial person 
 to get the work done — no matter what the conditions 
 of labour, as long as certain limitations as to cost and 
 quality are fulfilled ; it serves to protect the client 
 and justify the architect, it has become an instrument 
 for sharpening and intensifying competition. It 
 postulates not that the client is being served by the 
 combined crafts, but that he is being cheated by the 
 contractor, who is making his profits out of them, 
 and that therefore it is necessary for an architect to 
 be employed as a counter check. This indeed, in 
 nine cases out of ten where ordinary work is concerned, 
 is the principle reason why architects are employed 
 at all : viz., that the client may save money, may 
 cheapen the cost by protecting himself against 
 “legitimate theft;” — one black coat is employed to 
 ward off another. 
 
 Now under a Guild system where labour was better 
 considered, and where .Standard was observed below as 
 well as above, a system in which the crafts were 
 properly organized and mechanical industry regulated 
 and de-limited, all this needless work & waste would 
 be saved, the parasitical portion of the profession 
 would tend to disappear, and the constructive, the 
 creative, the practical portion would once again get a 
 better chance. This parasitism in the profession is 
 illustrated by the disproportionate value of an architect’s 
 services in surveying and consultative work, as against 
 his work as a producer. He will snap up a fee of 
 40 guineas for a couple of days’ work in advising or 
 “ surveying ” while weeks of creative work of the 
 highest skill, of the finest taste, of the most beautiful 
 138 
 
J 39 
 
 A Church in Gloucestershire Reroofcd under ihe Guild system. 
 
draughtsmanship and invention will not bring him in 
 the same amount. 
 
 And how is this reconstruction in the profession going 
 to come about, this change from the contract system 
 to the Guild system? Until the three propositions 
 I have laid down in this Chapter are generally accepted 
 by the whole body of the profession, it cannot be 
 effectively carried through, but much can & is being 
 done by individual architects who have dissociated 
 themselves from the arid professional ways of working, 
 and have surrounded themselves with a body of crafts- 
 men with whom they work in more or less close 
 relationship. This has been the method pursued by 
 most of those architects whose names are associated 
 with the Arts & Crafts movement. 
 
 I could show a number of buildings that I have built, 
 with the aid of the Guild craftsmen, upon what I 
 should call the Guild system as distinct from the system 
 of Contract. I have no hesitation in saying that the 
 result has usually been better and it certainly has been 
 more interesting. The difficulty of course has been 
 that unless the margin allowed for extras has been 
 very liberal these have “sometimes been exceeded. 
 But then, except upon expensive work, be it large or 
 small, the contract system is unsuitable for providing 
 work that is good. You do not get out of it the 
 maximum amount of human value, and that system 
 must in the end be the best where the men show most 
 interest in their work. The contract system does not 
 give them such an interest. Then some buildings 
 cannot be built by contract at all. The pictures I 
 give on p. 134 & p. 135 show a mediaeval poor house 
 in Devonshire which had been wrecked by a local 
 builder, & which I rebuilt with the aid of the Guild 
 workmen; it could only have been carried out in 
 this way. So too the little Essex Church shown 
 140 
 

 Interior of an Epiphany Chapel in a Church in Wiltshire, 
 
 141 
 
on p. 137. It was much better for me working as an 
 architect to have a group of conscientious workmen, 
 say a joiner or two, a few masons, and a couple of 
 blacksmiths, all of whom were intimate with me, 
 knew my ways & worked in my spirit, than to “put 
 the work out to lowest tender.” Indeed, it could 
 not have been so done, for the spirit & sympathy of 
 the old work we wished to retain would have been 
 lost. Another example where the bulk of the work 
 was done not on the building but in the workshops 
 of the Guild is show on p. 139, the interior of a little 
 Gloucestershire Church for which the Guild joiners 
 and carvers made the new chancel roof & then when 
 all was complete went & themselves fitted it together 
 in the building. 
 
 It may be said that these examples applying as they 
 do to old work — work that is in the nature of repair 
 or restoration — are not a fair test, and that to be 
 effective, work of this kind must be done according to 
 old methods ; that is partially true, but my experience 
 is that in new work the Guild system is even more 
 applicable, for in such work, the quality of personal 
 freedom, of individuality has more scope, and the 
 craftsman if left alone works with more enjoyment. 
 On pp. 1 41 & 143 I show such a piece of modern 
 work, a reredos with its details which is being erected 
 by the Guild craftsmen in a Church in Wiltshire 
 while these sheets are going to press. The sympa- 
 thetic handling of the carved detail in relation to the 
 architectural whole could, to my thinking, be only 
 properly obtained by such a more or less intimate 
 association as existed between the craftsmen and the 
 architect during the progress of the work. Nor does 
 the system apply any less to building on a larger scale, 
 on pp. 145 & 147 are shown houses that I have con- 
 structed in this way in London. 
 
 142 
 
Detatl from the Reredos shown in the previous picture. 
 
 143 
 
We are not concerned here with the details of the 
 financial or other relationship between the architect 
 and the workmen, the tie may be as elastic or as close 
 as possible ; it does not matter as long as it is human, 
 and has some ethical bearing upon life and work, as 
 long as it is something more than the cash nexus. 
 In this does the Guild principle lie, and with the 
 principle only are we here concerned, for in it is 
 involved the whole future relation of the architect to 
 the crafts. His position at present is hopelessly un- 
 satisfactory ; he may check, perhaps design, but he 
 is not put into the much more important position of 
 practically producing, of really seeing work through. 
 Until the Community accords him this position also, 
 until the architects themselves insist on having it, 
 there will be but little hope for the craft of building. 
 The architect will remain the arid professional man 
 he at present is, outside social life, except that of the 
 country house, and occasionally the church, where he 
 gets his only opportunities, and the craft he practises 
 will be arid even as he. The last picture I show in 
 illustration of the practical working of the Guild 
 system is of a Gloucestershire manor house upon 
 which some dozen of my Guild fellows and I worked 
 for about two years. We had to rebuild a ruin that 
 had mostly fallen, and add a new wing. The foreman 
 and I were at work together one day, trying to save 
 a crumbling wall and much perplexed as to how the 
 costs would work out and what our client, a paragon 
 of clients, might say to us. “ I suppose,” put in the 
 foreman laconically, “ when the old monks had this 
 place men hadn’t to calculate things so fine as you 
 and me,” I explained that in all probability we should 
 have been “ kept ” by the Abbey, given our housing, 
 food, clothes, and good schooling for our little ones, 
 with something over if the work turned out well. 
 *44 
 
Houses i7t Londoii built not under the Contract system but 
 under the Guild system. 
 
 K 
 
 145 
 
He thought for a moment and then said, “ Well, that’s 
 more than most of us get now.” And he was right, 
 it is just that insecurity of the weekly wage service, 
 that constant effort to build character on foundations 
 of sand, that makes it impossible for us under com- 
 petitive conditions to get the best work out of men. 
 For the building trade we want a new system that 
 will give us once again more leisure, more margin, 
 more permanence, more recognition of labour and skill. 
 The building trade and the architectural profession 
 that should guide it, have been rotted, corrupted, and 
 degraded by Industrialism over which they have lost 
 control, and I conceive the first duty of the profession 
 in our day is to regain its hold corporately upon those 
 economic conditions which are destroying it as an art 
 and craft. In my view that greater solidarity between 
 the architect and the crafts which is implied in the 
 Guild system is bringing us a little nearer to our 
 objective, and could we but realize it in the craft as 
 a whole, it would mean for the public once again as 
 it meant of old a boundless yield of the creative 
 imagination of men, for it would bring once more 
 that margin of good measure into the craft of build- 
 ing upon which we insisted before in other of the 
 minor crafts in the shops. 
 
 Thus do we get back to our refrain ; production must 
 be controlled by the producers. I remember 2 1 years 
 ago when the original plan of the Guild and 
 School of Handicraft was unfolded to an able and 
 cynical business man, a near relative of mine, he said, 
 “ And so you propose first of all to educate people to 
 produce the sort of things you think they should have, 
 then you propose to make the things in question 
 yourself, next you intend to be your own distributor ; 
 — may I ask if you intend also to be your own 
 consumer ? ” One might almost have answered 
 146 
 
Interior of a Hall in a London House , built , decorated, and 
 in great part furnished, ?iot under the Contract system but 
 under the Guild system. 
 
 K 2 
 
 147 
 
“Yes ! ” The audacity of the proposal as presented 
 to him was so great that it not only warranted the 
 cynicism of his question but challenged the imperti- 
 nence of the rejoinder. “ Yes,” however could only 
 mean one thing, the labour state . If production is 
 controlled, distribution and consumption find their 
 own level. But 2 1 years ago the “ labour state ” 
 was as far away as the cloud-cockatoo-town of 
 Peithateiros, the Athenian adventurer ; since then the 
 country has been covered with technical schools, the 
 Science and Art Department has been reconstructed, 
 the County Councils have been established, a labour 
 Department has been initiated, and the cities of 
 England with an awakened civic consciousness have 
 for the most part accepted Trade Union principles & 
 now do annually many millions of pounds worth of 
 municipal trading of their own. The “Yes” has 
 come in a manner which no one could have 
 conceived.* 
 
 Now the bearing of the individual experiment of the 
 Guild of Handicraft upon the general questions here 
 involved appears to be this. What applies in one 
 case could and should apply with greater force to the 
 whole; the position held by me in relation to the 
 different shops of the Guild is in -petto the relation 
 which the whole body of architects might hold to the 
 Arts and Crafts of the country at large. To the 
 argument that this “ will not pay the individual 
 architect ” we must set the reply that it will pay the 
 Community as a whole, and that it is a matter of life 
 and death to the Craft of Architecture. The Arts 
 and Crafts of our dav need, and to a certain extent 
 
 * Sec also House’s “ British City l* in which are given the figures 
 from the “ Municipal Year Book ” and from the author’ s report 
 to the Washington Labour Bureau on Municipal ownership in 
 Great Britain . 
 
 148 
 
149 
 
 A Manor House in Gloucestershire built not under the Contract system but under the 
 Guild system . 
 
express an enlightened self-consciousness that dis- 
 tinguishes them from the work of the past ; theirs 
 must be a knowledge of their right relationship to 
 Industry as a whole. This is where the craftsman 
 of the 20th differs from him of the 14th and 1 6th 
 century. William of Wykeham, Henry Harland, 
 Henry Eveleigh, John Thorpe, Huntingdon Shaw, 
 Viansen, Torrigiano, Thomas Chippendale, all men 
 who left an indelible mark on English craftsmanship 
 knew their trade, no men more so, but set them 
 in the modern workshop, in Sheffield smithies, 
 Shoreditch woodshops, Birmingham metal shops, and 
 we should see the high technical skill doubtless 
 remaining, but infinitesimally narrowed down, and all 
 the energy of genius thrown into grasping the social 
 and economic condition under which the whole 
 complex web hung together. It is these social and 
 economic conditions which we architects have first 
 to understand and then to control, if we are to lift the 
 great Art we profess once more upon the pedestal 
 that should receive it. Art, Architecture, the Crafts, 
 are for the moment, alas, by the way. For a com- 
 munity of any honour these must be again made 
 necessities ; they can only be made necessities by an 
 understanding and an intelligent direction of the 
 economic forces upon which they themselves depend. 
 
CHAPTER XII. THE ECONOMIC STATUS 
 OF THE CRAFTSMAN IN THE FUTURE. 
 
 In considering the question of the economic status 
 of the Craftsman in the future, I must remind my 
 readers that he has, under existing economic con- 
 ditions, no status as a craftsman at all. That is to 
 say the actual market value of his skill is determined 
 by the trade union rate of wages in the particular 
 industry in which he works, in which he competes 
 with or controls the machine. 
 
 Thus if he be a carver his rate is from 8y^d. to i/- 
 an hour, if a smith from yd. to i /-, if a cabinet- 
 maker from 8d. to i/- and so forth. This rate is 
 determined fundamentally by the action of industrial 
 machinery, moreover this rate is nominal only, for 
 the wage being weekly it is, as every workman 
 knows to his cost, liable to practical stoppage through 
 long periods of short time or cessation of work. 
 
 Now the only way in which the Craftsman of 
 exceptional skill and with the ability to create and 
 invent, can free himself from this weekly wage 
 dependence is to become himself a small master, and 
 by employing other craftsmen at the standard rate or 
 below it, to divert such margin of profit as there may 
 be into his own pocket. Moreover my experience 
 shows me that the finer type of craftsman is more 
 often not the type who has that particular organizing 
 ability that makes it easy for him to do this ; he is 
 too absorbed in his work, and hence his reward often 
 never comes to him at all. As I have also pointed out, 
 owing to the non-existence of any Standard, the 
 better and more individual the work the greater the 
 risk to him or to any one financing him. The 
 
 151 
 
attempt of the Guild of Handicraft was to combine 
 various groups of men together under a collective 
 holding of Capital and in so doing secure the crafts- 
 man’s economic status. The experiment, as I have 
 sought to show, succeeded on its human and aesthetic 
 side, but has failed so far as a permanent undertaking, 
 owing to causes outside the craftsman’s control. 
 Status in other words was attained for him in a 
 singularly successful way on its human and social 
 sides, for he lived his life, a life of considerable 
 culture, skill and breadth of interest ; but it has 
 broken down economically, because social conditions 
 are not yet ripe; we are as my shareholder on p. 73 
 says, still too uncivilized. Here again the Guild of 
 Handicraft represents in petto the condition of 
 the craftsman generally ; his civic intelligence is 
 increasing, so is his skill, so is his appreciation for 
 culture; the choice of tools to his hand is enlarging 
 daily, but his economic position and his opportunity 
 of doing good work is growing more and more 
 precarious, because he is at the mercy of an unin- 
 telligent industrial order — or disorder. This instability 
 varies with the craft ; but to say this, is equivalent to 
 saying that it varies with the development or the 
 absence of regulation in industrial machinery 
 employed in the crafts in question. 
 
 Casting about him for some political ally, who shall 
 understand his point of view, the craftsman turns 
 from the spasmodic patronage of the Tory and the 
 indifference of the orthodox Liberal to the Socialist. 
 But here too he has so far looked in vain. The 
 somewhat bourgeois point of view of the respectable 
 Fabian Socialist for instance in matters that relate to 
 Art and Craft is no use. The Fabian for the most 
 part does not understand, it is not that he would not 
 sympathise if he understood, but his point of view 
 
in these matters is unpractical because it is narrow ; 
 it is not based on personal experience, and artists and 
 craftsmen have not as a rule the faculty of expression, 
 except in their work, to make themselves understood. 
 Now the points I wish to establish in this Chapter 
 are three : — 
 
 1. An independent economic status must be 
 
 accorded to the Craftsman. 
 
 2. Status in each trade should be dependent 
 
 upon skill and excellence in the craft. 
 
 3. This is likely to come, but it will come 
 
 gradually and through the two means with 
 which I deal in Chapters XIV. and XV., a 
 wider national ideal in Education and a 
 linking of the craftsman to the land. 
 
 Little by little the constructive steps will be revealed; 
 as the Social Democracy receives and accepts respon- 
 sibility, as the new State we are shaping takes form 
 and consciousness, each craft, each occupation, each 
 activity in life will find its place in the new order, & 
 its relationship to the greater whole grow clearer. 
 By faith we shall remove mountains, but when some 
 of us started preaching 25 years ago, nobody would 
 listen, we were scoffed & jeered at ; and now we have 
 Cabinet Ministers trying in a purblind way to work 
 things out practically, — one even who was a working 
 craftsman himself, albeit an engineer. The idealists 
 always win in the end. We could do with a little 
 more understanding of labour in the Cabinet. 
 
 It is another interesting little record from the early 
 history of the Guild that when the present head of 
 the Local Government Board, John Burns, was an 
 unknown 44 agitator ” to the unspeakable scandal of 
 
 153 
 
“ the Times ” and every respectable organ, we craftsmen 
 in East London helped him with his dockers’ strike, 
 and the Guild of Handicraft took from him and his 
 two fellow “ agitators ” a commission for painting a 
 blue silk banner for the new Trade Union — which 
 showed the “ dockers’ tanner ” — a great Golden Sun 
 of a sixpence rising gloriously above the unloaded 
 shipping of the London Docks. That was a practical 
 manifestation of Arts and Crafts in modern life. If I 
 have carried my readers with me so far it will be 
 evident to them that in order to secure this economic 
 status for craftsmanship, two things must be done: we 
 must in the first place free the Craftsman from the 
 Trade by some independent means of distribution, 
 and we must in the second place free him from the 
 more purely wage protecting tendencies of Trade 
 Unionism. 
 
 To take the first, there must be such greater freedom 
 accorded to the man who has skill and invention as 
 shall make it possible for him to continuously practise 
 his work without being at the mercy of the “ Trade,” 
 and one of the first things that will have to be done is 
 the creation of some distributive machinery, perhaps 
 even State aided or controlled, that shall serve as a 
 protection to him. At present he inevitably & again 
 and again becomes the prey of the financier, or the 
 distributor who lends money, and poses in the eye of 
 the public as a manufacturer. The process is very 
 simple, and it works in this way. I could show it 
 in most of the Crafts with which I have had to do ; 
 it varies according to workshop conditions, but as the 
 craft of silversmithing serves for a good example I 
 take it once more in illustration. A firm of so-called 
 “ silver manufacturers ” start a distributive business ; 
 they are not really manufacturers at all, they may be 
 Jewfinanciers ; they subsidize a number of little makers 
 U4 
 
/ 
 
 in Birmingham or elsewhere, squeeze them dry one 
 after another, then sell them up, and it often happens 
 that the working craftsman who has invented and 
 made quite decent things, has been lured into small 
 mastership, then destroyed, and has afterwards had 
 to hire or buy over again all his own stock at an 
 exorbitant price, after it has been duly depreciated 
 and sold by him at “ market value ” to the financing 
 firm. This may happen over and over again and 
 the profits are wonderful. 
 
 From these meshes of finance that are strangling 
 them, ruining Standard and destroying status, the 
 crafts must be freed, and the best way for this to be 
 done is for some properly authorized and registered 
 distribution to take the place of the present wrecking 
 system. For my part I see no reason why we 
 should not frankly work through the great distri- 
 butive houses, license them if need be, make of 
 the great stores, or of Messrs. Novelty, Nobody & Co., 
 the recognised agents for certain groups or schools of 
 craftsmen after their work has been duly passed and 
 accredited by the societies or schools to which they 
 belong. We need them as distributors, and a fair 
 price should be paid for distribution as for produc- 
 tion, but we must stop the wrecking & the sweating ; 
 for here, in the spoiling of tradition which comes of 
 the former, and the constant bidding for cheaper 
 labour implied in the latter, lies the ruin of the 
 Crafts. 
 
 I trust I may not be thought to be unfair to the great 
 distributors, and whatever I may have said of Messrs. 
 Novelty, Nobody & Co. is not to be taken as 
 personal ; they are just parts of a system which we 
 have got to change, and are changing. I have 
 nothing against them except that they happen to be 
 in the fortunate position of distributors, while my 
 
 *55 
 
Guildsmen and I are producers. “ Heute mir und 
 morgen dir” ; the labour state of the next generation 
 may turn the tables, and it is quite on the cards that 
 their children, the little Novelties and the little 
 Nobodies, may come before the children of my 
 Guildsmen sitting in the consular chair to judge their 
 skill in craftsmanship, and then it may be said of 
 them, “ What a handicap it must be to you, never to 
 have had any workshop tradition, indeed you will be 
 no good for this nobler work of production ; therefore 
 seeing, as Plato says, that those who be no good for 
 anything else sit in the agora all day buying and 
 selling, you must needs go back to the West End and 
 serve behind the counter.” 
 
 The distributive part of our problem of Arts and 
 Crafts in modern Industry is important, but it is 
 secondary, for distribution is ultimately determined 
 by production, and not by the demand of the con- 
 sumer. If the producer, as would be the case in a 
 State where labour had a greater share, allowed only 
 certain things to be produced, and such things only 
 as are up to a certain standard, the distributor would 
 only be able to sell those things ; and however much 
 the consumer might clamour, as we are now advised 
 he does, for cheap goods and rubbish, he would not 
 be able any longer to get them. To recall once 
 again the instances cited in Chapter IX., whether we 
 offer books through the publishers, or jewels in the 
 West End, or furniture at a country auction, if we 
 make these things well at the outset, the community 
 in the end gets good work, not bad. Once regulate 
 production, and stamp out the cheap commodity and 
 the cheap life about which it turns, the fixing of the 
 status of the craftsman will follow, and the thieving 
 of invention, the cornering of products, the wrecking 
 of good workmanship will be more easily dealt with. 
 1 56 
 
“ A very dangerous Socialism ! ” say my Conservative 
 friends. Mr. Balfour does not seem to think so, 
 for the argument which he used in a recent speech 
 against Socialism"' is the very one which we of the 
 Arts and Crafts would use. in its favour, “ You will 
 never have individual initiative carried to its most 
 effective limits,” said he, t£ unless you give that 
 security to the results of enterprise which, it used to 
 be thought, was the primary duty of a government to 
 give.” No champion of Socialism could have stated 
 the case for the Arts and Crafts under a condition of 
 regulated and non-competitive society more finely than 
 Mr. Balfour. No doubt he was thinking of the 
 enterprise of the financier, and the individual initiative 
 which puts the craftsman at his mercy, but the 
 craftsman who finds his enterprise and individual 
 initiative destroyed, not unreasonably takes exception 
 to the existing system, and asks for one in which he 
 shall be given a little of that security which is now 
 given to the financier. 
 
 The financing or exploiting firm, however, is not the 
 onlv power from whom the craftsman has to emanci- 
 pate himself. He has also to free himself from that 
 other side of Industrialism which at present helps him 
 half-heartedly ; he has to emancipate himself from 
 the rougher element of labour that makes for levelling 
 down rather than up, the power that in its struggle 
 to obtain the minimum wage would do this at the 
 cost of the finer skill. The danger here is not so 
 great, but it is a danger none the less, for what applies 
 to the great organizations of engineers and boiler 
 makers, printers, and compositors, and many of those 
 Trade Unions that are the outcome of Industrial 
 machinery does not apply to the organization of the 
 
 * Mr. Balfour in the City. “ Times f Jan . 24 th, 1908. 
 
 J 57 
 
crafts ; it does not apply to the net work of small 
 workshops that are needed for Standard in craftsman- 
 ship. In other words the Guild system that we wish 
 to re-create must relate itself to Trade Unionism, must 
 get its position defined as guaranteeing Standard, must 
 get itself accepted by the Trades Unions. The real 
 crux of the difficulty here lies in the control of the 
 small workshop, and the conditions of little mastership. 
 Organized labour and Trade Unionism has learned 
 from bitter experience that the difficult shop to control 
 is the small shop, not the large factory. It is here, 
 in the small shop, that the unsanitary conditions, the 
 sweating, the long hours and the undercutting, have 
 been the hardest to check. But I would see the 
 small workshops licensed, and made the centres of 
 highest privilege and Standard, and I see no reason 
 why this should not be done by the Trade Unions 
 themselves. 
 
 It will be obvious to all who have practical experience 
 in those lines of work with which this book 
 deals, that, given the minimum wage at one end of our 
 scale, & at the other such facilities for distribution of 
 good craftsmanship as should make it possible for the 
 finer type of craftsman to continue doing his work 
 without having recourse to the illicit advantages of 
 little mastership, there would be less temptation for 
 him to sweat his apprentices or keep his shop foul. 
 That being so there would be no longer room for 
 Trade Union opposition. Good work moreover, as 
 every practical workman knows, has in it a certain 
 ennobling quality that helps everything else along. 
 Thus then are we led by easy stages to the second 
 proposition which I am seeking to establish in this 
 Chapter, viz., that the craftsman’s status should be 
 based upon skill and excellence in his work. One of 
 the lessons of the Arts and Crafts movement is that 
 *58 
 
it can and should be graded on such a basis. * The 
 
 need for this the Trades Unions do not yet fully 
 realize ; naturally so, for their concern has up till 
 now been with the conditions imposed upon labour 
 by Industrial machinery, and, as I have shown, these 
 conditions exclude the Arts and Crafts. 
 
 If, however, by that more intelligent labour legislation 
 at which we seek to arrive, we delimit machine 
 production in the interest of the community as a 
 whole, we inevitably make for status in craftsmanship, 
 — status through skill. By gradually being given 
 and accepting responsibility for Standard, the different 
 Unions would very soon find this out for themselves, 
 they would see too, as we of the Arts and Crafts now 
 see, that this insistence upon status through skill is 
 not incompatible with democratic principles, that 
 indeed it is of the very essence of the finer Socialism 
 that every man should give tp the Community the 
 very best that is in him. 
 
 The third point which I wished to make in this 
 Chapter was that this status through skill is likely to 
 be achieved for the Craftsman by means of a better 
 developed educational system, and through some 
 solution of the land question in his interest. But 
 here we are met with what at the outset appears a 
 difficulty. The land postulates life in the country, 
 and educational facilities, as far as the craftsman is 
 concerned, are in the town, and mean for him life in 
 the town. A more intelligent system however will 
 correct this, will adapt itself to country conditions, 
 will take into special consideration the possibilities & 
 needs of craftsmanship as carried on in the country, 
 
 * The Arts and Crafts exhibitions have shown that a number of 
 young men immediately came to the front as soon as the chance 
 was given . Had the Society been strong enough to stick more to 
 its principles , this would have continued. 
 
 *59 
 
and not lend itself to that sucking of everything that 
 is best from the country into the town, which has 
 been so disastrous to all country crafts. At present the 
 Board of Education rules are planned upon the 
 hypothesis, not of National education, but of education 
 “in chunks” — primary, secondary, technical, & so 
 forth. In large towns where these chunks can be duly 
 cut off & divided, the system may work, in the country 
 it does not work at all.* Furthermore and as a con- 
 sequence of this system of chunks, the Board’s 
 regulations are very complex and burdensome, and 
 such a thing as Arts and Crafts, even of the very 
 simplest, can hardly be said to come under its 
 purview at all. The whole system as far as 
 the country is concerned should not only be more 
 flexible, it should also be more intelligent ; there 
 should be links between country schools and 
 town schools, there should be summer sessions for 
 town craftsmen in country schools, country areas 
 should be grouped together, and the Inspectorate re- 
 arranged. All this could be quite easily done, but since 
 there is as yet no consistent educational policy, all is 
 so far in embryo, and much has got to be cleared out 
 of the way first before new growth can be made. 
 The entire question of education indeed has got to 
 be grappled with seriously, and in its relation to the 
 whole of National life; at present, few people think 
 
 * Here is an example of how the chunk sy stein works. In a 
 village of 1250 inhabitants are two schools both recognized by the 
 Board. School A is equipped for Science and Geography , School 
 B for Cookery and Carpentry. The village boys and girls attend 
 both y but the Board puts School A into the secondary chunk and 
 School B into the Technical chunky with the result that because 
 grant is paid to School A for Science and Geography , therefore 
 grant is disallowed to School B for Cookery and Carpentry. As 
 a consequence the village children have either got to pay specially 
 for the cooking and carpentry teaching or do without it. — Q.E.D. 
 
 160 
 
of the future at all, only of the parsons and the 
 endowments. 
 
 With some of these matters I deal more fully in 
 Chapter XIV. Here I wish only to insist that for 
 the economic status at which we must aim, sound 
 technical education in craftsmanship is essential ; and 
 further that if I am right in my contention that the 
 place for the Crafts is in the Country, this education 
 must be brought to the craftsman there. He should 
 be able indeed to find in the country suitable edu- 
 cation for his children, and higher education for 
 himself, and he could himself be used to teach in 
 those fundamentals which he understands, which are 
 among the essential facts of life, and of the know- 
 ledge of which we have been deprived by Industrial 
 machinery. Industrial machinery has sterilized our 
 Education system, in my view we must revivify this 
 system with the. Arts and Crafts as our objective and 
 with the conviction, to which the Community is 
 bound sooner or later to come, that Industrial 
 machinery must be checked and regulated in the 
 interest of the Community as a whole. 
 
 If my ideal in Education is frankly advanced and 
 modern, my ideal in the next matter that I wish to 
 handle — the land — is as frankly mediaeval. Rather I 
 would call it a mediaevalism modified by the conditions 
 of regulated machinery. To the mediaeval condition 
 of course we can never return, but we have a great 
 deal to learn from it, & this primarily, that the right 
 relation of the Craftsman to the land should be one of 
 sustenance, not of exchange. The proposition con- 
 tained in this is one that depends for its value upon 
 its practical working out. But I hope later on to 
 give some definite proposals in this direction. 
 
 The economic status of the craftsman will largely 
 depend in the future, as it did in the past, upon the 
 
 1 6 1 
 
relationship of his labour in craftsmanship to what is 
 got out of the land, and upon the directness of this 
 relationship. A week’s work for a 15th Century 
 mason was equivalent to “ three sheep and a pair of 
 shoes.” An English mason now can barely earn two 
 legs of mutton in a week, let alone the shoes. 
 Numberless other cases of the relative value of produce 
 as against craftsmanship indicate in the past the 
 craftsman’s status economically. With such a margin 
 the man had leisure to do good work, he also did less 
 work, because the work done was good, and thus he 
 had more time for making life all round more 
 complete. The details of how this may be worked 
 out I hope to show more fully in the last chapter but 
 one of this book, but what I wish to insist on here is 
 the necessary connection between status and land. A 
 link with the land must, in the nature of things, imply 
 economic stability. It is just this stability which the 
 present weekly wage dependence of craftsmanship 
 lacks. The times and seasons of the year somehow 
 postulate a yearly not a weekly wage, they demand a 
 year’s looking ahead, and so it should be with crafts- 
 manship, for craftsmanship, like the times & seasons, 
 cannot be hurried. The beauty of mediaeval work, as 
 all students of the Middle Ages know, is in its 
 sense of leisure, and that leisure can be shown in 
 numberless cases to have a direct economic relation- 
 ship to agriculture. Giotto’s history of labour is 
 known to all the world, and there is scarce a 
 Cathedral in Europe* in which the avocations of 
 the months — the arts of agriculture — are not the 
 working motives of the craftsman. 
 
 “ Oh, but ” it may be said, “ we have altered all that 
 with Industrial machinery.” Yes, but however true 
 it may be that Industrial machinery has changed our 
 economic conditions, still its results are not the only 
 162 
 
concern of national life. That state of wage-slavery 
 and want of civilization in which we find ourselves 
 now, must be corrected by a conscious search for the 
 finer, the imaginative things of life, by an encourage- 
 ment once more of the creative and spiritual powers 
 of man. I believe we shall find much of this again if 
 we secure the economic status of the craftsman. 
 
 Before we leave this question of Status, it may not be 
 out of place to touch upon certain points of deeper 
 significance involved in it. The craftsman stands for 
 the dignity of labour — labour emancipated from 
 machinery. In the attitude of the average man 
 towards life we need a fuller recognition of this fact. 
 But the advent of Industrialism which has brought 
 into the house of every man, rich and poor alike, the 
 cheap and ugly and uncontrolled product of the 
 machine, has developed in us a most detestible 
 fiunkeyism. We British are sensitive enough to the 
 Feudal idea, and its baser form — snobbery; but this 
 deluge of the cheap machine product has made us 
 measure everybody’s worth by the number of mecha- 
 nical objects he has about him— -motor cars, or mantel 
 shelf rubbish as the case may be. He who in these 
 days has most, can indulge most in the two flaunting 
 vices of philanthropy and patronage. We want a little 
 robust democracy again as a corrective, and this re- 
 establishing of the status of the craftsman, free of the 
 machine on the one hand, and the support of the 
 mechanically overfed on the other, is likely to bring 
 this corrective. 
 
 Wise old Dr. Johnson defined a patron as one who 
 paid with insults and was repaid with flattery. The 
 definition still holds, but its psychology has been 
 changed by Industrial conditions. The flattery now- 
 a-days is in cloth and privilege, much as of old, and 
 the implied insult comes from those who permit and 
 
 163 
 
demand it, but the workman to whom has come a sense 
 of a state that he is reconstructing, hates philanthropy 
 as he hates patronage. Industrialism has sharpened 
 his insight and brought him this hatred. A young 
 Colonial girl on a visit to Campden once asked quite 
 naively, when this question was under discussion, 
 whether English boys were always supposed to touch 
 their hats to peers and parsons. It was difficult to 
 answer an unqualified Yes or No, but an old 
 workman colleague of mine whose democratic instinct 
 I respect, replied most effectively by refusing to touch 
 his hat to anybody. So much do I admire the 
 principle underlying his motive that I always recognize 
 it by touching mine to him, and were it not for the 
 half friendly, half grudging nod that I receive in 
 exchange, I should have a malicious sense of getting 
 the better of him in courtesy. I confess to a sneaking 
 desire of some day being able to win him over to a 
 return salute. But parson and peer alike can in these 
 days only be accepted on the plane of innate gentility, 
 if as is sometimes the case, they happen to be without 
 it, democratic instinct bids us keep our hats on our 
 heads. 
 
 Democratic instinct may be wrong, but when it does 
 begin to question the social rightness of the position 
 from which the good is administered, when the good 
 itself comes to be regarded as a due rather than as a 
 favour, the offering of the good grows to insult* 
 
 * A fine illustration of this is in the now famous letter of the 
 “ Gilded Beggars f in which two ex-Prime Ministers and two 
 financial peers appealed to the philanthropic public against 
 putting in force an Act of Parliament which enabled the L.C.C. 
 to feed the starving London School children . Mr. Balfour and 
 Lords Rosebery , Rothschild and Avebury had evidently excellent 
 hearts , but they must have been gloriously unconscious that their 
 letter made many right thinking men tingle with shame and 
 
and democratic instinct refuses any longer to bestow 
 the flattery of thanks. That is why patronage and 
 philanthropy conceived as the bestowal of good things 
 from above downwards, are to the English workman 
 with his constructive Socialism, anathema. 
 
 It will seem hard to many who love the past and the 
 ethics of the past that so much of it must be brushed 
 aside, but we are putting a finer thing in its place. 
 Much too that we think is still there is gone long 
 ago. What we need i)ow is new centres of organic 
 life, and we shall get these if we can find for the 
 craftsman that economic status for which I am 
 pleading. Industrialism is the great solvent that has 
 loosed all existing bonds, and we need bonds to build 
 up a civilized life once again . For the workman 
 just at present there are practically no bonds outside 
 his family. His trade union is the best thing he has, 
 it gives him a partial guarantee of livelihood, it gives 
 him esprit de corps , but it lacks the finer things of 
 life, the soul. The Church means little or nothing 
 to him, for it has not kept pace with his thought 
 nor his economic needs; his parish means less, for the 
 parish has been destroyed by Industrialism which has 
 set labour moving. The only folk who are now 
 interested in the parish as an organism, are the little 
 shop keepers, and they have an eye to business; there 
 can be little vital connection between the parish and 
 labour under existing industrial conditions. 
 
 But once delimit machinery and regulate it, establish 
 once again status in craftsmanship, status through 
 skill, and all these things will grow stable; in our 
 English manner too we shall use the old forms to put 
 the new life in. An American friend of mine who 
 recently came over to study England and English 
 social questions, summed up his impressions in the 
 phrase, “ What one misses in English life ” (he spoke 
 
 165 
 
particularly of the life of the Craftsman with which 
 I am dealing), “ is the uplift!” It is just this 
 “ uplift ” that so strikes the Englishman when he 
 goes to America or the Colonies. I pleaded that it 
 was more possible where the population was 16 to 
 the square mile against 600, but I did not believe in 
 the truth of what I was saying. There is no “uplift” 
 in English rural* districts. But I knew too from the 
 experience of the Guild of Handicraft which has 
 meant the bringing of a number of highly skilled & 
 intelligent men together into an English country 
 village that it was quite possible to find this “uplift ” 
 once again. What we need now is to secure the 
 conditions of life in which it can find itself. The 
 doing of this is partly political, but mainly religious, 
 or should we not rather say ethical. It can both be 
 found and given in the life each man leads, but it 
 is the life of Craftsmanship that gives it a peculiar 
 charm and possibility, could we but secure the 
 economic status of the craftsman. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. BASIC CAPITAL AND 
 PERSONAL CAPITAL. 
 
 In my last Chapter I pleaded for the independent 
 economic status of the craftsman, & insisted that this 
 status should in each case be dependent upon skill 
 and excellence in craftsmanship. I showed how this 
 was likely to come by way of a solution of the 
 problems that face us in England — the education 
 question and the land question. I want now to look 
 at the question — the question of the necessities of 
 craftsmanship — from the point of view of capital. 
 How or in what form is the capital to be found to 
 carry on the Arts and Crafts in a modern Industrial 
 Community ? 
 
 It is evident that in our national development, and 
 this does not apply alone to England, we are rapidly 
 approaching a condition in which certain forms of 
 national work and the life that depends on them will 
 be legislated for, and their capital controlled by the 
 community : collective ownership in short applied to 
 the great industrial concerns and the larger uses of 
 machinery. It is, however, also evident that there 
 are large numbers of human operations which cannot 
 be treated in this way, and among them are the Arts 
 and Crafts. 
 
 Now the experience of the Guild seems to have 
 proved in the first place that until the operations of 
 Capital in some of these larger undertakings are con- 
 trolled, the little workshops will have but a slender 
 chance, and in the second place that it is only in the 
 little workshops, like those of the Guild, that the sort 
 of work and the qualitative Standard aimed at can 
 possibly be achieved. 
 
 167 
 
The question, therefore, which now we have to put 
 ourselves is : In what form is this other capital to 
 
 he supplied to the craftsman ? It is the question of 
 Status once again, in other terms. If we admit that 
 the economic tendency of our time is to place the 
 large basic industrial concerns under State and muni- 
 cipal control, and further that there are great num- 
 bers of small workshops which must both for the 
 sake of product and producer be allowed to develop 
 by themselves ; if we admit next that a line can and 
 should be drawn between these two, we are faced 
 with the question how are the economic conditions 
 necessary for the continuance of the small workshop 
 to be found ? In what form is the necessary capital 
 to be supplied ? The answer lies in part in a recapitu- 
 lation of the proposals I have already laid down in 
 Chapter VIII. and in those I have still to develop in 
 Chapter XV. ; but they have now to be stated in 
 another way, we have now to look at them from the 
 point of view of the small producer himself. Both 
 question and answer are of the utmost importance in 
 view of the rapid development of Collectivist prin- 
 ciples in our great cities, and of that want of the 
 finer qualities in our industrial life, the imaginative 
 and non-material qualities. 
 
 Before offering the answer in detail let us develop the 
 question. In what form shall the necessary capital 
 be found for the craftsman, the little man, the man to 
 whom Standard is the objective and for whom the 
 little workshop is an essential ? Nick Bottom (or if 
 we may transpose the names and crafts), Peter 
 Quince, the blacksmith, Snug the joiner, Snout the 
 silversmith, and Flute the jeweller, if my readers will 
 refer once again to their labour sheets in Appendix 
 IV., — these are the people who are doing the real 
 work of craftsmanship, they are quite capable of 
 1 68 
 
making, Peter Quince his iron gate, Snug his cabinet. 
 Snout his silver tea set, and Flute his jewel, if we 
 would only leave them alone to do it. True a little 
 refinement and schooling in tradition would do them 
 no harm, and they might even act a Bernard Shaw 
 play for Duke Theseus, or do a Bergamasc dance 
 again in the intervals of their labour, if we only gave 
 them leisure enough ; but at present their labour 
 sheets show that they are too heavily taxed, that they 
 have too many people to bear on their shoulders to 
 make it possible for them to go on working as in- 
 dependent craftsmen. 
 
 I want to find for them a means whereby they can 
 offer this excellent work of theirs to the community 
 that needs it, at something approaching the labour 
 price; how is this to be done ? 
 
 Obviously no capitalist would touch them as an 
 investment even with Oberoil as a guarantor and 
 Puck to insure prompt payment of the dividend. 
 The safe investments, the gilt-edged securities are not 
 in the Arts and Crafts, not in the “ hempen home- 
 spuns;” they are in land, in ground values, in 
 monopolies and patents, in food stuffs, transportation, 
 beer, armour plate, insurance, and all such things as 
 mainly apply to the Community’s average needs. 
 The others are unsafe, precarious, they are the personal 
 things that apply to its finer needs, the things that 
 signify the culture, the love of beauty, or the refine- 
 ment and wider education of its citizens. Capital is 
 wanted for both, but it is wanted for either in 
 varving degrees. In the former it is needed in much 
 larger quantity than in the latter, in the latter its 
 proportionate return is much less, the proportion of 
 labour to other charges is greater,, and also the risk 
 is greater, because so much of the unknown human 
 quality enters, so much of the individual, of his 
 
 1 69 
 
personal character.* Little by little we are learning 
 to differentiate between the capital that goes into the 
 former and the capital that goes into the latter, the 
 industrial capital and that “ other ” capital to which 
 no distinguishing term can be given, but which we 
 might call personal. 
 
 A study of the Arts and Crafts historically as well as 
 practically shows that in the Middle Ages men had 
 grasped the central need of industry, that labour and 
 consequently the standard to be set in labour must be 
 controlled by the labourer. The mediaeval Guild 
 system implied the predominance of labour over 
 Capital. On the other hand the absence of 
 machinery meant the absence of industrial capital. 
 For us therefore is set a completely different problem. 
 Now while the instinct of the working classes is 
 leading them slowly and certainly towards the col- 
 lective control of Industrial capital, they have not 
 yet learned to separate the capital needed for industrial 
 concerns from the capital needed for all those other 
 things which cannot be fitted into the industrial mould. 
 But a deeper study of mediaeval life gives us the clue, 
 while a practical study of the Arts and Crafts in the 
 modern workshops shows us the road. The reason is 
 obvious, there is no other way of practising the Arts 
 and Crafts except the mediaeval way ; and the lesson 
 of the making of a piece of work leads us to the way 
 in which it must be taught, and the way in which the 
 
 * A case in point illustrates this . A young Guild craftsman had 
 made a very beautiful ornament of gold and enamel , his experi- 
 ments were successful up till the final firing when the whole piece 
 with three months work collapsed in the furnace. The manager 
 who very rightly was considering the shareholders and the dividend, 
 asked “ How am I to charge this up ?” but though the Technique 
 was now mastered the work was abandoned. Palissy and Cellini 
 when they had similar experiences were not working on a weekly 
 wage basis for dividends. A healthier social condition enabled 
 them to pay for their own experiments. 
 
 170 
 
workshop must be ordered wherein it is to be made. 
 Modern scientific knowledge and the position of the 
 Arts and Crafts within modern Industry no doubt 
 modify this ; but the key to the position is manual 
 labour, — the labour of man’s own hand, not the labour 
 that is done for him by the machine, not the method 
 of the mysterious rich person beyond the realms of 
 Prester John. Once again let me repeat that I do not 
 for a moment want to return to the Middle Ages. I 
 want merely to get from them the realities, and the 
 greatest of these was their mastery of the problem of 
 labour, its organization, its qualitative standard, and 
 the realization of its finer human purpose. 
 
 The practical study of workshop conditions, as they 
 affect the Arts and Crafts in modern Industry, com- 
 bined with a study of the economic conditions of the 
 workshops of the past, point not only to a larger 
 co-operation of labour, but to 'one that will leave 
 considerable freedom to the individual craftsman ; & 
 the following are offered as some of the forms in 
 which Bottom, Snout, Quince and Snug shall be 
 supplied with the capital necessary for them to go on 
 with their occupations. 
 
 i. For the fuller carrying out of the Educational 
 suggestions made in the foregoing chapter, 
 we must have proper schools of craftsman- 
 ship both in town and country, but more 
 especially in the country, where the craftsman 
 shall receive the necessary training and if 
 need be his certificate or hall mark of skill. 
 A man’s educational equipment is his most 
 valuable form of capital. Here we should 
 simply work along the existing lines. Such 
 schools as the Central School of Arts and 
 Crafts, The Birmingham and Manchester 
 
 l 7 l 
 

 Schools of Art, and the Leicester School, 
 should be our models, or such a school as we 
 have at Campden, and others. The 
 admirable work of the Board of Education’s 
 Circulation Department should be further 
 developed, and there should also be an inter- 
 change among the schools of their scholar- 
 ships and other privileges. 
 
 2. A proper distributive machinery either through 
 municipal galleries in connection with the 
 schools (as indicated on pp. 8 5 & 87), or 
 through the State recognition of existing 
 distributive agencies, with a view to reducing 
 the crowd of competing agencies that at 
 present prey upon the craftsman, and set 
 him to compete unfairly as has been shown 
 in Chapter III. 
 
 . Periodical exhibitions of the workmanship of 
 craftsmen, preferably through existing 
 societies, such as the Arts and Crafts 
 Exhibition Society, and other local bodies 
 of like character ; and these societies should 
 be given practical recognition by the State 
 or the municipalities, much as the R.A. 
 obtained practical recognition by the free 
 gift of Burlington House, — so that their 
 members should be able to exhibit regularly 
 both collectively and individually without 
 heavy cost to themselves and the imminent 
 fear of bankruptcy to the whole Society 
 from one unsuccessful Exhibition. 
 
 4. If in No. 1 we have our craftsman’s training, 
 and in Nos. 2 & 3 a systematic means to 
 help him distribute his wares, we have 
 
 172 
 
already found for him two of the main 
 needs for which at present Capital is 
 required. We must next go further and 
 help him with his market. Undoubtedly 
 the first market for such things as are not 
 industrial and yet are needed, — the Arts & 
 Crafts, — should be near at hand, should be 
 the local market, the market close by the 
 school where he has been trained. Local 
 municipalities and district councils should 
 and doubtless will support and give com- 
 missions to their own rate - supported 
 schools, and the men and women of their 
 training, and this should be insisted upon 
 and encouraged in every possible way. 
 There is obviously no sense in giving men 
 a costly and careful training, and then 
 providing them with no means of putting 
 it to use. 
 
 5. Towards this end a development of the 
 
 Collectivist principle seems inevitable. 
 The city will and must obtain from 
 Parliament greater powers for controlling 
 its own economic environment, for checking 
 local competition, for making it possible 
 for its great basic industries to be conducted 
 by itself, and for enabling its little work- 
 shops to be carried on cleanly and 
 healthily. 
 
 6. But the city is likely to go further, viz., to 
 
 acquire or control outlying districts of land 
 where it can have country colonies or out- 
 posts of its own citizens, to run, as Glasgow 
 does a dairy farm, or groups of small 
 holdings for direct supply. This will serve 
 
 173 
 
the double purpose of feeding the town- 
 dwellers and of planting them out where 
 necessary or desirable. 
 
 7. And this leads us to one of the most vital 
 
 questions in modern civic development, 
 the question of illness due to large work- 
 shops, the question of physique and the 
 close pent-up life of the great town. Every 
 English city will have to find means for 
 securing occupations, as it could through 
 the Arts and Crafts — in the country, under 
 clean and sane conditions, for those of its 
 citizens who have a tendency to weak 
 lungs, nervous or other disorders, but who 
 may be perfectly sound and fit in all other 
 respects. Some of us have seen the North 
 Italian coppersmiths working out in the 
 open at their anvils in the sunny streets, 
 that is the ideal way of working such an 
 industry, and it can just as well be done in 
 England. Every English village black- 
 smith still works thus, covered and open to 
 the air. 
 
 8. All the above are proposals for finding non- 
 
 industrial capital, and finding it in kind. 
 The last proposal here offered is of a dif- 
 ferent sort. There should be groups, or 
 leagues, or Guilds of customers combining 
 together, to support and take the produce of 
 groups of craftsmen. Those who followed 
 me in my chapter on limited liability will 
 remember that I there indicated a method 
 in which this could be done. I conceive 
 that a gradual building up of such organi- 
 zations would tend, provided the crafts- 
 
 ‘74 
 
man’s basic needs of food and housing were 
 already met, to raise the qualitative stan- 
 dard, for it would set up among the dif- 
 ferent organizations a rivalry not of cheap- 
 ness, but of excellence. The craftsman’s 
 output in other words would be decreased, 
 and it would at the same time become 
 really good, the annual cartloads of rubbish 
 might give place to one good piece of 
 work, we might even get again some of 
 the leisure by which a monk of Bury put 
 ten years in to illuminating one book. 
 
 It was a fine remark, upon which many people com- 
 mented, made by one of the younger Socialist M.P.’s 
 recently, when in his speech he declared that 
 Socialism was the only idealistic movement left in 
 Europe. He may or may not ,hnve been right, but 
 that was the proper spirit in which to approach 
 political questions. The spirit that grabs for one 
 section of the Community, or from another, the 
 spirit that rallies to the protection of property on the 
 one hand, or for its division on the other, & without 
 any reference to the greater national well being, is 
 not idealistic at all. Those of us who are trying to 
 think things out ahead of the politicians, and to give 
 them working ideas, see that the logic of Collectivism, 
 public trading, the State control of industrial functions, 
 only takes us up to a certain point. It deals with 
 the broad, basic needs of modern life, it does not 
 directly help its finer, its more imaginative, more 
 personal, less tangible needs. And those of us, who 
 like myself and the many craftsmen who have 
 worked with me at the different crafts in the Guild’s 
 eight workshops and upon the many buildings I 
 have had to handle, know quite well that Collectivism 
 
 175 
 
as a working system, though it may be applicable to 
 the great mechanical industries, to electricity, to 
 locomotion, to coal mining and so forth, has no chance 
 of direct application to the little workshops, those 
 little shops where the human something is wanted to 
 make the work good, and to engender that idealism 
 which our Socialist would see in life. The carpenters’ 
 bench, the cabinet makers’ tool chest, the jewellers’ 
 blow-pipe, the silversmiths’ stake, the blacksmiths’ 
 anvil, all these are best under the workman’s immediate 
 control, and to win their secret from them we want 
 neither the exploiting individual capitalist as at present, 
 nor the greater state capitalist proposed by the formula 
 of Collectivism. 
 
 But there is another way yet in which this whole 
 question must be regarded, another reason why the 
 little shops must be saved. The ignoring of the little 
 shops, means the ignoring of those multitudes of 
 personal considerations and personalities so dear to the 
 English Temperament. Every state of society is the 
 resultant of the conflict of ideas within it, and it is 
 probable that the labour state if it comes, will come as 
 a compromise between the collectivist and the indi- 
 vidualistic ideals of life. I do not think our Socialists 
 will ever succeed in building up their labour State 
 until they realize the power that these personal, might 
 we call them feudal, considerations exercise over the 
 English mind. Perhaps it is right that they should 
 not succeed, that these things should not all be set 
 aside ; and here perhaps, in the maintenance of what 
 is best in the direct relation of men of different caste 
 and class and type, different training and tradition, the 
 tie of the land, the link of culture and labour, here 
 perhaps may lie the future of the great Conservative 
 Party, beaten, broken, leaderless for the time being, & 
 corrupted by wealth. If in the coming order of 
 176 
 
labour it could gather round it all those personal 
 interests, those finer aspirations of labour outside 
 machinery, the other things that are dependent not 
 upon industrial Capital, but upon that other, that 
 personal capital which as in the great feudal period, 
 we might once again give largely “ in kind,” there 
 would be more merit in being a conservative ; for we 
 should have an order more worth conserving : — there 
 may be something in the Tory Socialism after all. 
 
 The English instinct perhaps is right that bids us 
 save all we can of the inherited culture, of the 
 traditional things that have given so much of what is 
 fine and generous to English life ; on the other hand 
 the instinct of the working classes is right too, which 
 condemns the whole commercial system as non-ethical ; 
 which condemns a system that subsists by grinding 
 for a profit, a system which regards everything from 
 the point of view of buying and selling ; which says 
 “ business is business,” thus ruling out all the finer 
 considerations of life, and which insolently assumes 
 that commerce can be permanently conducted on 
 those lines. 
 
 It has been said that the great organization of 
 Imperial Rome lasted just so long as those who 
 controlled it believed in it, and when they believed 
 no more the system fell to pieces. One of the most 
 hopeful signs in England and America is the growing 
 disbelief of the leaders of Industry themselves in the 
 work they are carrying on. I have talked quietly 
 with many such. Whether in London, in the Mid- 
 lands, whether in Pittsburg or in Chicago, I have 
 observed first a doubt, then a cynical indifference — a 
 shrug of the shoulders and qui bono ? Very different 
 this from the attitude of the old-fashioned merchant 
 manufacturer, the old quaker of the generation of 
 our parents and grandparents. When one touches 
 
 177 
 
 ■ M 
 
the man himself, apart from his routine, his associa- 
 tions, when one gets to the real human factor, as 
 often as not he now disbelieves in the whole thing. 
 The idealism of the Commercial system belongs to 
 the “ Crystal Palace ” age of our grandfathers, it 
 dwells in Industry no longer. 
 
 If that be so, indeed, is it not conceivable that an 
 absolutely different character will clothe the great 
 industrial organizations when their leaders suddenly 
 find they are working not for themselves, but for the 
 Community, the Idealism wanting now will be 
 suddenly there. The purpose of this Chapter has 
 been to point to the distinction between basic or 
 industrial capital, and that other capital which we 
 may term personal. Broadly, I conceive that the 
 former is likely to be controlled for the benefit and 
 to fulfil the material wants of the whole community. 
 The latter must be allowed to go free, to flow, as it 
 inevitably will, into the finer, the more generous, the 
 more imaginative things of life. 
 
 Here again the Arts and Crafts movement contains 
 deep lessons for Modern Industry, not alone of 
 determining its right and wrong, of fixing its imagi- 
 native and its material limitations, but of simple and 
 direct interpretation. We have forgotten all about 
 the seven deadly sins in these days ; we imagine 
 perhaps that science has exorcised them, that we have 
 evolved into some condition of character where it is 
 no longer necessary for us to consider them other 
 than as picturesque allegories. But the masque of 
 life is never played out, and perhaps in the light of 
 that keener national consciousness which the peoples 
 and races are evolving, the old “ seven deadlies ” will 
 stand as hale and lusty as ever. 
 
 What form, we might well ask, do they take in the 
 pageant of Modern English Industrialism ? For my 
 178 
 
part I see always in prominence sloth and envy, and 
 I see them much in the way Kit Marlowe saw them 
 in the Tragedy of Faustus. Sloth the sin of our 
 English and American leisured class, when im- 
 personated by the gentleman loafer and parasite ; 
 “ begotten on a sunny bank,” at an English country 
 house, perhaps, “ where I have lain ever since, & you 
 have done me great injury,” he says to the militant 
 Socialist who is proposing to disturb him, “ to bring 
 me from thence : let me be carried thither again !” As 
 for envy, is it not the peculiar and pet sin of English 
 labour — labour that has lost its anchorage and become 
 un-skilled, the million spawned casual of the machine. 
 The poet’s words might well be inscribed over the 
 doors of Salvation Army shelters, and serve as a text 
 for Mansion House charitable relief Committees, or 
 be written upon the banners of the unemployable 
 employed as they march each winter to the West 
 End. “ I,” says Envy, “ am begotten of a chimney 
 sweep and an oyster-wife. I cannot read (except 
 cheap newspapers), and therefore wish all books were 
 burnt. I am lean with seeing others eat. O that 
 there would come a famine through all the world, 
 that all might die, and I alone live (on the rates !), 
 then thou should’st see how fat I would be. But 
 must thou sit and I stand ! Come down with a 
 vengeance ! ” It was in that mood that the stones 
 were thrown at the club windows in Pall Mall 25 
 years ago, when the Socialist movement first began in 
 earnest. 
 
 The shams and the duties of life remain with us. 
 Even though we have to admit that Democracy and 
 the feudal ideal are hard to reconcile, that the 
 teachings of modern science, of revolutionary France, 
 of Industrial England, have knocked the bottom out 
 of the Anglican Catechism, that in the deep of our 
 
 179 
 
 M 2 
 
hearts we do neither desire nor pray to “ remain 
 in that state of life into which it has pleased God to 
 call us,” that we do not really any longer believe 
 that we have fallen from the station of inferior 
 Angels, but rather that we have risen from that of 
 superior apes, and intend to rise higher. Granted all 
 that, still the fundamentals remain, the need for 
 Idealism, the need for Reasonableness ; there remains 
 the fact of Envy as distinct from the desire for 
 personal progress, there remains the fact of Sloth as 
 distinct from the love of wise leisure. It is in the 
 study once again of these two “ deadly sins ” in 
 English life, and how to correct them as a people, 
 that we shall learn the way to determine “ Industrial” 
 from “personal” capital, and this may lead us to 
 the greater knowledge of the true limitations of 
 Socialism. 
 
CHAPTER XIV. THE EDUCATION 
 QUESTION AND ITS BEARING UPON 
 ENGLISH CRAFTSMANSHIP. 
 
 I have put as the last two chapters of this 
 book, before its conclusion, the question of education, 
 and the question of the land. Their intimate bearing 
 upon the future of the Arts and Crafts in modern 
 Industry demand for them a chapter each. In the 
 last we left our subject with the endeavour to find 
 the ways and means by which Capital could be 
 placed at the disposal of the craftsman — eight different 
 ways were indicated, which, taken together, would 
 enable him to stand alone in his little workshop 
 within a state that was gradually assuming a non- 
 competitive and collectivist form. In growing less 
 competitive the State will become also more conscious 
 of the need for upholding Standard and differentiating 
 between the basic and personal forms of Industry. 
 Now just as it is a man’s capital if he be well 
 educated, so is it the community’s capital if the 
 whole body of citizens be so. In this Chapter, there- 
 fore, I desire to do two things : to show the bearing 
 of the Arts and Crafts movement upon the education 
 question and to illustrate this practically by the 
 educational work that has been done by a group of 
 men working in the spirit of the movement, though 
 in a very small way, over a period of six years in the 
 country ; to show how they have tried out of existing 
 conditions and with very imperfect machinery, to 
 construct something that shall have some permanent 
 value educationally. 
 
 Perhaps at the outset it might be well to put the 
 question, what is the lesson that the Arts and Crafts 
 
 1 8 1 
 
movement has for education ? The answer will help 
 us to the constructive issues of our subject, and the 
 answer is this. The Arts and Crafts are a funda- 
 mentally educative force in themselves, but owing to 
 the accidental position they occupy in modern 
 Industry we need an educational system so constructed 
 as to consciously supply the lacunas which their 
 exclusion makes. 
 
 From this we are led to the following deduction, viz.: 
 that the education to be supplied by the State must 
 have two objectives. It must be first an education 
 adapted to the whole body of citizens whose chief 
 concern in life is always likely to remain the handling 
 and use of industrial machinery, and it must have 
 also the possibilities of an education adapted to those 
 who have ability to pursue the work of higher 
 status implied in the Arts and Crafts. 
 
 If it be admitted that my view of the probable 
 development of Collectivist principles is a right one, 
 and also my contention that basic and personal 
 capital will have to be differentiated, it is obvious 
 that the educational system of the country will have 
 to take this fact into consideration, and this at present 
 it does not do. But here I would like to make a 
 personal confession, and also anticipate a criticism from 
 educationalists themselves ; speaking as one of them I 
 hold with them that all this Socialism, this state and 
 bureaucratic interference, this complex supervision & 
 regulation is odious and repulsive. The ideal way 
 obviously is to find the educationalist, give him the 
 money and leave him a free hand, but I see that this 
 cannot be done in a democratic and partially civilized 
 state, so I shrug my shoulders and say, “ It is for the 
 educationalists to educate the Board,, to do this 
 periodically, and get the system made as flexible as 
 possible.” 
 
 182 
 
Now with our minds fixed upon the Arts and Crafts, 
 and the two objectives in our educational system to 
 which allusion has just been made, let us examine the 
 bearing upon it of the great determining factor 
 Industrial Machinery. Every form of Craftsmanship 
 from the early Middle Ages down to the destruction of 
 the crafts in the 1 8th and 19th centuries, carried its 
 own educational ideal within it. The Industrial 
 Revolution of the 1 8 th Century and the coming of 
 Machinery, which destroyed the crafts one by one, 
 completely altered our national need in Education. 
 The gradual settlement of some of the greater problems 
 of Machinery altered the need again, our newer 
 modern ideas of the function of the State, the colonial 
 development of our own time, and the forming of 
 our conception of the qualitative standard through the 
 Arts and Crafts, is likely to completely change the 
 need yet once more. 
 
 We are apt to overlook the permanence and con- 
 tinuity of the mediaeval workshop organization ; all 
 that was needed to meet the newer national wants of 
 the Renaissance when our modern educational ideals 
 first took shape was a greater scope for mental 
 development, scholarship, “ literae humaniores.” 
 Everything else was supplied by the crafts, for the 
 mediaeval organization of the Crafts was still in 
 practical force. The Industrial revolution, however, 
 destroyed their educational force, and, when the 
 Education Act of 1870-1 was passed, the intention 
 was to supply the bare needs of mental development, 
 reading, writing, arithmetic. What we now need is 
 something very different, we need something to 
 mitigate Industrialism ; as the catch word has it, 
 the three R’s have to be supplemented by the three 
 H’s, Hand, Heart, Head, and that may incidentally 
 mean that as a people we shall drop our H’s no longer. 
 
 183 
 
All this does history show us, but a finer teaching 
 than the study of history is the educational bearing 
 of a clean well-conducted workshop upon the men 
 who work inside it, and whose livelihood it repre- 
 sents. That is the discovery of the Arts and Crafts. 
 It is just in the inventive workshop, the workshop of 
 craftsmanship as against the reduplicative workshop, 
 the workshop of the machine, of Industrialism, that 
 there lies a fundamental difference in educational 
 value. The latter has its educational value too, in 
 discipline, in order, in regularity, in esprit de corps , 
 and so forth ; but infinitely greater is the intellectual, 
 the imaginative, the creative force that the workshop 
 of craftsmanship gives its members. This has been 
 observed times out of number by those who have 
 visited the Guild workshops.* 
 
 The distinction between the educational need of the 
 Industrial workshop and the workshop of craftsman- 
 ship was well stated once at a conference on higher 
 education convened by the Gloucester County 
 Council when a number of employers of labour were 
 asked to give their opinion upon the education needed 
 for youths of from 14 upwards, and as to the value 
 of apprenticeship or its possible substitute educa- 
 tionally. One of the manufacturers, a scientific 
 instrument maker, got up and said : “ I do not want 
 for my workpeople what Mr. Ashbee wants for his. 
 He wants men of high skill, invention, thorough 
 training, I have no need for any of those things. All 
 I need is accuracy, and this I get from my machinery, 
 Therefore to be quite frank with you, gentlemen, I 
 do not want any education for my hands at all, I 
 
 * Many illustrations could be given especially from German and 
 American sources. The interested reader is referred to a. recent 
 article by Berlepsch Valendas in “ Kunst und Handwerkf 
 1908, IV. 
 
 184 
 
want them as young as I can get them, I want to 
 pay them as low wages as possible, I want to use 
 them up as quickly as I can, throw them away and 
 get others. Their education is no concern of mine 
 whatever, that I hold to be a matter not for the 
 employer of labour but for the state.” 
 
 This distinction between the Arts and Crafts and 
 Industrialism then, gives us an educational lead, and 
 emphasizes the two objectives upon which I have 
 insisted. It shows us how two forms of Education 
 are needed for our young workmen. Education out- 
 side his work for the industrialist ; Education once 
 again in and through his work for the Craftsman. 
 The Community needs both. 
 
 At this point then it may be permissible to draw 
 attention again to the practical value of the Guild of 
 Handicraft as solving in petto one of our national 
 problems; for here we have another of the fundamental 
 things which 20 years of work has proved, viz., the 
 educational value of craftsmanship. Educationalists 
 talk about this, but they have very little opportunity 
 of working it out, for the simple reason that they 
 have not at their disposal the practical workshops in 
 which to carry out their ideas, and if they had the 
 workshops, they have not the years of life needed in 
 each individual trained, wherein to test the training. 
 The deeper study of history indeed shows us even 
 more, it shows us how the life of the workshops has 
 produced certain types of character; if we were to 
 look more closely at the mediaeval organization of 
 cities like Florence, Nuremberg, London, we should 
 have no difficulty in tracing the influence of their 
 workshop conditions upon the character and type of 
 the men they produced; men like Eveleigh, Harland, 
 Huntingdon Shaw in London, the earnestness of 
 Cromwell’s Ironsides, the happiness of Simon Eyre 
 
 185 
 
 Id 
 
 ■^lU 
 
 m. U( 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 
 CL r\(, irl 
 
and his journeymen as Dekker drew them, Hans Sachs & 
 Pieter Fischer in Nuremberg, Donatello, Brunelleschi, 
 Caparra the “ ready money” blacksmith, in Florence. 
 Countless instances could be cited to show how the 
 education in and of the crafts, produced certain types 
 of character and citzenship. Who shall deny that 
 they were worth having or that we might not con- 
 sciously emulate them again. It is a question of 
 freedom for the individual once more, freedom within 
 a larger restraint, freedom for labour from the control 
 of finance, and from those who would harness Arts 
 and Crafts for purposes of exploiting and profit. 
 Production we have insisted must be controlled by the 
 producers, but it will be evident to every thoughtful 
 man, especially if he thinks about the education 
 question that this requires qualifying in two respects. 
 The producers must be educated, and the producers 
 must include those who are responsible for the higher 
 as well as the lower forms of production. We have 
 not as yet thought of our Education system in relation 
 to labour as a whole, much less to any coming labour 
 State, and the unintelligent Socialist is as ready to 
 undervalue brains and talent as the unintelligent Con- 
 servative is to overrate the danger of misdirected 
 labour. But the time has now come when we must 
 look at education from the point of view of labour, & 
 of labour as modified and transformed by Industrial 
 machinery. 
 
 If the educationalists and those who have the shaping 
 of the system realized the meaning of this as fully as 
 do those who work in the Arts and Crafts, if they 
 realized that the casual, the cheap man, the man with 
 no standard and no minimum rate, was the product of 
 unregulated Industrial Machinery, they would allow 
 the greater need for the State dealing with the funda- 
 mentals of citizenship on the one hand, and the 
 1 86 
 
maintenance of Standard on the other, and not leave 
 these to the haphazard care of individual enterprise as 
 at present. In this country we are as deficient in 
 educational system in the fundamentals of citizenship, 
 as in higher technical education, — the two sides of 
 our medal again. Our great polytechnics & Technical 
 Schools have not yet found their feet, and in the 
 simplest elements of Education we are as yet far 
 behind. Cleanliness, Courtesy, Character, Citizenship, 
 all these are matters upon which apparently it is not 
 considered essential to insist nationally. We have 
 relied upon the traditional culture of our leisured 
 classes to help us through, and they have proved a 
 broken reed, for they have not been intelligent enough 
 nor strong enough to cope with the over-whelming 
 pressure of cheap men and women from below, the 
 cheap unregulated human product of the machine. 
 My contention therefore is that' the Arts and Crafts 
 in so far as they touch both sides of our medal, the 
 finer “ obverse ” of Standard, and the simpler 
 “reverse” of the minimum wage, must be incor- 
 porated into our educational system. They must 
 become a part of its elementary work on the one 
 hand, and we must on the other give scope & chance 
 for the higher Standard and skill which they imply. 
 Here again however the Socialist has the Educationalist 
 by the heels, for he says, not unreasonably as to the 
 first, “ concede my rights of citizenship,” and he adds 
 as to the second, “ what is the good of giving this 
 higher Education if there is no employment for the 
 higher labour.” To this the craftsman adds the 
 needful rider, “ Regulate your machine output, control 
 Standard, and let me do my work.” So do we come 
 back again to the same refrain with which we started 
 in our first Chapter. The Arts and Crafts have as yet 
 no economic basis, they are dependent upon the 
 
 187 
 
whims of the few wealthy, they should be broadly 
 based upon the wants of the whole community. The 
 general purpose of this book in which their position 
 in modern Industry is examined from all points of 
 view, is to get the public to ask itself the question : 
 How can this best be brought about ? How can we 
 give them their economic basis ? At the present 
 moment too they are engaged, in the sphere of 
 Education, upon an acute if perhaps unconscious 
 struggle with the Trade. The Trade has begun to 
 feel the competition of the independent craftsmen, the 
 combination of these craftsmen in Guilds, & the com- 
 petition of amateurs. The Trade which should draw 
 its inspiration from & be the revivified and transformed 
 by the Arts and Crafts, is endeavouring to destroy 
 them. The way in which this shows itself is in the 
 present attitude of Employers of labour towards 
 polytechnics and technical schools, and in the ex- 
 pression of this attitude on County Councils. They 
 begin to raise the cry “ What is the good of this to 
 us ? We want hands. We have to make profits in 
 order to subsist ; craftsmanship as such, Standard, all 
 these things for which you are clamouring are not 
 our concern, we are there to exploit, not to produce.” 
 Education, for those whose primary interest is profit 
 upon craftsmanship, cannot be an end itself ; there 
 will be enthusiasts always, and men who see clearer, 
 but at the present moment the national ideal in edu- 
 cation suffers from the competitive struggle of the 
 business men among themselves. 
 
 Looking at the question now from the point of view 
 of Education in the country as against the town, we 
 are faced with the further difficulty to which 
 reference was made in Chapter XII. What strikes us 
 above all is the complexity of the existing system, 
 the impossibility of rightly applying to the village 
 1 88 
 
what may work in the town, and the impracticability 
 of the present system of education by chunks 
 (see p. 160 and note). 
 
 We must reconstruct our educational system in its 
 relation to the village, — the country side, — and as 
 soon as we can get intelligent people in the country 
 to see the need of education in the country at all, we 
 shall probably do something, but the existing con- 
 fusion is almost hopeless. 
 
 An official friend of mine at the Board of Education, 
 who must be nameless, recently said with a sigh, 
 “ The Board are always longing to devise schemes for 
 rural schools, but our experience is that people in the 
 country don’t want them ; what they really want & 
 are always asking us for, is education that shall fit 
 them to go into towns and to do better.”* Precisely! 
 there we have it, and what we have now got to do is, 
 pari passu , to devise schemes for getting the towns- 
 man to come out again into the country and show 
 him how he can do better. 
 
 By way of illustration, a brief outline may now be 
 given of the idea at the back of the Campden School 
 of Arts and Crafts, the practical work it has suc- 
 ceeded in doing in a population of about 1,300, 
 and incidentally of my own experience as Hon. Corre- 
 spondent for Higher Education in the county area, 
 over which it operates. My colleagues on the 
 Higher Education Committee will probably agree 
 that the educationalists just at present, what with 
 the Board on the one hand, and the local authority 
 on the other, are somewhat in the position of the 
 oysters in the poem of the Walrus and the Carpenter. 
 The Board is sympathetic and condolent, it invites us 
 to walk and talk ; the local authority is brusque, 
 
 *See also “ The Heart of the Country ” by F. M. Hueffer. 
 
 189 
 
ruthless and rather like the Carpenter, it has other 
 things to think about than education, and its first 
 concern is to save the rates. The Walrus draws up 
 regular and magnificent memoranda which the oysters 
 really enjoy, it talks of many things, “ of shoes, and 
 ships, and sealing wax, of cabbages and Kings,” but 
 all that is neither here nor there to the practical 
 Carpenter, he merely dockets the literature, continues 
 to cut down the rates, and when remonstrated with 
 just growls that “ the butter ’s spread too thick.” In 
 the county of Gloucestershire we have probably one 
 of the most capable and intelligent County Education 
 Committees in England, but whenever this body tries 
 to make itself felt, or seeks to carry through any 
 thorough or far reaching educational undertaking, it 
 is swamped by the bucolic party, who decline to 
 spend the necessary money, or to levy a rate for 
 higher education. This is due to the present system 
 of rating, that throws the bulk of the burden of taxa- 
 tion upon the wrong shoulders.* 
 
 Then the whole system is so complicated that 
 probably 25 per cent, of the money to be devoted 
 to teaching goes in administration. In our little 
 village technical Educational Centre, now that we have 
 become a limb of the National system, we have been 
 visited in five years by eleven different inspectors, 
 many of them overlapping, and giving conflicting 
 instructions, we have to do annually with more than 
 fifteen separate educational authorities, we have to 
 
 * Thus the rating being upon the messuage , the professional man , 
 or Tradesman, or the man of independent means in a small 
 country town or village, who may be worth, let us say, 500 a year, 
 would contribute a few shillings to such a rate, while a farmer 
 ear ning the same amount from his business would have to con- 
 tribute as many pounds, the result of course is that all the farmers 
 are opposed to an Education rate, and are keen to cut down 
 expenditure. 
 
 190 
 
1 9 1 
 
fill innumerable forms, be subjected to a variety of 
 different audits, and all for the sake of an annual 
 grant of £i 50. In case I should be thought to be 
 exaggerating, I give in Appendix III. the list of 
 these “ thrones and dominions, princedoms, virtues, 
 powers,” and all this rigmarole, all this pishery- 
 pashery before public money may be used in teaching 
 a little girl to wash an apron or a village lad to use 
 an anvil, not to mention some trifle of music or 
 national literature, as a palliative to the maudlin 
 sentiment of the parish magazine, or the uncontrolled 
 rubbish of the cheap press. When to this there is 
 to be added the fact that the chief work of an 
 honorary correspondent is to ward off the attacks 
 made upon him by one or other of the dozen or so 
 educational bodies incessantly at feud, and ready to 
 pounce upon him for extravagance, or bleed him in 
 what they believe to be the public interest, it may 
 readily be supposed that even a man of leisure shrinks 
 from so thankless a public service. 
 
 Now the idea behind the Campden School of Arts 
 and Crafts is this. It recognizes the fact that there 
 are certain existing State aided agencies for education, 
 elementary, secondary & so forth, over the area in which 
 it has jurisdiction, and it recognizes the further fact that 
 Industrial Machinery acts in a certain manner upon 
 the trade and occupation of the area ; it therefore 
 seeks to fill up the gaps which the existing agencies 
 cannot supply, and endeavours to give whatever the 
 existing trades and occupations most need ; and it does 
 this with the deliberate intention and hope of giving 
 to all its students, some 300 men, women & children, 
 such opportunities for general improvement and culture 
 as the means at its disposal warrant. It seeks to offer 
 the highest and the lowest, thus endeavouring to be 
 in itself a real centre of Education. In this way it 
 192 
 
Cooking Class at the Campdcn School of Arts and Crafts. 
 
combines a University Extension Centre with technical 
 work in stenography, typewriting, work at the bench, 
 carpentry and the use of metals. It has country classes 
 in farriery, farm occupations, cooking and laundry, 
 and it gets the bulk of its students together with 
 music, singing and popular lectures. There are village 
 gardens, there is instruction in swimming, in the 
 rights and duties of the citizen, and in physical drill. 
 A comprehensive view of Education, within the con- 
 ditions of modern Industry, and within the limitations 
 of a countryside, is what we aim at. We are of 
 course far away from the fulfilment of our aim, and the 
 resources placed at our disposal are ludicrously inade- 
 quate, but we believe that we are working in the 
 right direction. We believe too that the sort of 
 higher education at which we are aiming is going to 
 make for a finer citizenship under modern industrial 
 conditions as they affect the English village. 
 Sometimes I seek to look at life through the eyes of 
 my young artizans, and then I find life only tolerable 
 if culture be permitted. The word culture is unhappy 
 in its misuse, but culture and that which goes with it, 
 culture in Matthew Arnold’s sense of the term, is 
 what I mean, leisure for reflection, for physical and 
 mental, fulfilment, the chance for one’s own individu- 
 ality, the sense that you are wanted in the universe, 
 that a niche is reserved for you. For these things 
 only does life under modern Industrialism seem 
 tolerable, but are not these things almost everything ? 
 If we have decided no longer to rebel against the 
 Industrial system, which chains us together, but to 
 quietly and firmly set to work and reconstruct it 
 (abandoning the position of Morris and Ruskin for 
 instance — the intellectual Ludditism), looking more 
 closely at how things have shaped since their death, 
 we find industrial organization ever screwing down & 
 194 
 

 N 2 
 
 x 95 
 
 Physical Drill at the Campden School of Arts and Crafts. 
 
screwing down, we find the drive severer, the com- 
 petition keener, we find industrial democracy ever 
 closing in, the ranks growing more serried, the 
 discipline more strict, the levelling and uniformity 
 more necessary, more terrible. 
 
 What becomes of the individual, of what weight is 
 the little human soul upon this dark archangel’s 
 scale. As my friend Mr. Sidney Webb I believe 
 once finely put it, “ the individual is the odd trick for 
 which we stake all the rest,” and with the knowledge 
 of this, we can afford to dismiss the tirades of our 
 monied and cultured friends against the “ levelling ” 
 of Socialism. They are biassed, and miss the point ; 
 for the finer culture in these days of Industrial 
 machinery is possible for all; but it implies the 
 regulation of machinery in the interests of all . 
 
 It is just this knowledge that must help us through 
 the quagmire of English Education. For those who 
 work in Industry alone, the finer culture must be 
 found outside, for those who work in the Arts and 
 Crafts it may be found within. The educationalist’s 
 business, if he has grasped this truth, is to distinguish, 
 to differentiate. 
 
 I was discussing these newer educational problems 
 with a workman friend soon after the withdrawal of 
 Mr. Birrell’s abortive Education Bill of 1907, and 
 asked, “ Is it too much to hope fhat the leaders of 
 constructive Liberalism — if there is such a thing — 
 should give us a little guidance on this point ?” He 
 
 blazed up at me, “ No, d them, they’re no good, 
 
 and there’s no such thing as constructive Liberalism !” 
 I think this was unfair, but the essence of truth in 
 his outburst lay here, — that they had not yet dis- 
 covered the distinction between the Arts and Crafts 
 and Industry, and hence no larger educational policy 
 in an Industrial State was as yet possible for them. 
 
CHAPTER XV. AGRICULTURE AND THE 
 ARTS AND CRAFTS. 
 
 In Chapter V. I gave a calculation by one of the 
 Guild Craftsmen, accustomed all his life to town 
 Conditions, of the savings in the family budget by 
 living in the country. Here is another which leads 
 us still more directly to that question of the basic 
 industry in addition to the Craft with which we must 
 now deal. *The budget is that of a highly skilled 
 workman with a wife and three growing children, 
 who in addition to his work tills a plot of half-an-acre. 
 It is significant because it shows the figures with and 
 without the basic industry. 
 
 Amount spent in the year without the basic industry 
 ^26, as analysed per week thus — 
 
 s. d. 
 
 Vegetables ---*20 
 Bread ----50 
 Bacon ----16 
 Eggs ----10 
 or say in round figures 1 o/- a week. 
 
 Amount spent in the year with the basic industry, 
 tilling a half-acre plot, £10. 
 
 In this expenditure is reckoned feeding of the pig, cut- 
 ting the corn, buying seeds and other items. In addition 
 to the cash saving of £16 there is fruit which comes 
 in for nothing, poultry which is reckoned to pay 
 itself, and probably a small surplus over. 
 
 Now setting aside the groceries, dairy produce and a 
 certain quantity of meat, which may have to be 
 
 * Other similar budgets have been given me , but the wife’s plea 
 often is that what is saved in the vegetable bill goes in increased 
 cost on groceries . 
 
 *97 
 
purchased, we have in this produce of half-an-acre a 
 very large proportion of the sustenance, the staple 
 produce, needed for a family of five, for which 
 nothing has to be paid beyond some healthy labour. 
 If instead of a single family unit we have say 20 or 
 30 families of craftsmen, and conceive of these as 
 each creating and consuming their own staple pro- 
 duce, and arranging among themselves for the dis- 
 tribution or marketing of the margin, we have what 
 is tantamount to a small community of craftsmen, 
 with an economic independence ; in other words 
 freedom for craftsmanship from the wage service of 
 commercialism. We have health, and we have 
 leisure for the individual. 
 
 We need of course some security in the land tenure, 
 or some modification of the existing system which will 
 give to the little Community the necessary stability. It 
 will be observed that what we are aiming at is not 
 exactly the village “ allotment ” on the one hand, nor 
 the “ small holding ” on the other. The first postu- 
 lates the agricultural labourer who lives primarily by 
 working on the land, the second an independent agri- 
 culturist who lives primarily by supplying and selling 
 his produce to an outside market. Out of these two 
 conditions, however, it is possible that something 
 can be constructed to serve the needs of craftsman- 
 ship, but the point upon which we have to insist is 
 that the objective must primarily be sustenance 
 and not sale . The condition aimed at must differ 
 from the condition of the labourer in the matter of 
 status and independence, and it must differ from the 
 condition of the small holder in the matter of the 
 sale of produce. 
 
 If now we look at the experience of small holders in 
 different parts of the country, the people who are 
 trying to make a living out of the land by the simple 
 198 
 
processes, the Craftsmanship of husbandry, we find 
 that the competition which they have to face is 
 much the same as that of the Arts and Crafts, which 
 we examined in Chapter II. It is the competition 
 of machinery and the competition of the amateur ; 
 only in the case of the English small holder the 
 machinery is away on Canadian Farms and Argentine 
 wheat fields, gardens in the South of France, or up- 
 to-date ships manned by Lascars ; while the amateur 
 competitor is the gentleman farmer often an Ameri- 
 can, or an English aristocrat whose estate is financed 
 by an alliance with the industrialism of Chicago, 
 Pittsburg, or Cincinnati. Also the competition is 
 further intensified by the manipulation of foreign 
 finance and the rigging of international markets. A 
 recent advertisement for a small holding, not far from 
 the centre in which the Guild does its work, elicited 
 a large number of replies from people who wanted 
 to give their holdings up, the reason given in many 
 cases was that they had nothing to do in the winter, 
 they neededanother a subsidiary occupation, the money 
 they got in the summer they lost or wasted in the winter. 
 In old days, the days before industrial machinery, 
 this occupation would have been supplied by the 
 Arts and Crafts of the home. If therefore we could 
 devise ways by which such small holders, as were 
 able and willing to have “ another string to their 
 bow,” could be freed from entire dependence upon 
 an outside agricultural market, we should be doing 
 much towards the establishment of a healthy and 
 independent peasantry once again. There is no dis- 
 guising the fact however that until recently there has 
 been a want of sympathy between the large landlords 
 and farmers on the one hand, and the small holders 
 on the other ; the former do not really like the idea 
 of healthy independence; things have been and are 
 
 199 
 
still made needlessly difficult for the small man. If 
 he starts in his own locality he has traditional 
 obstacles to overcome, he is supposed to he rising out 
 of his station ; if he settles in the countryside he is 
 for long treated as an outsider and bled.* 
 
 With the problem of the small holder as such we 
 are here not concerned, it would be an impertinence 
 for those who are not engaged in the raising and 
 marketing of agricultural produce to lay down 
 plans for those who have devoted their lives to the 
 problem, but there is one question that the outsider 
 may perhaps be allowed to ask. Are we really right 
 in regarding Agriculture in the same way as we 
 regard competitive Industry, as a matter of exchange ? 
 Is it economically, is it nationally sound to do so ? 
 Granted that it may be right and necessary for our 
 great industrial centres to have foreign markets to 
 draw from, is it a sound policy to deal with the 
 home producer as if he were a foreign producer, as 
 if his standard of life did not concern us ? 
 
 The question is apposite here because it has so close 
 a bearing upon our problem of the Arts and Crafts. 
 It never seems to occur to people that the fact of our 
 sending everything up to market may mean that we 
 have not enough left to eat ourselves. And yet that 
 is what often happens, and the children in our 
 villages are sometimes half starved because there is 
 literally not sufficient nourishing food for them to 
 eat. Everything goes as tribute to the great town, 
 and the return in bad beer, bad clothing, bad machine- 
 made utensils, bad tinned stores are no fair equivalent 
 for what the village sends away. I have lived in a 
 village in Oxfordshire where milk was very difficult 
 
 * For the first two or three years of the Guild's settlement m 
 Camp den, the local tradespeople kept tip two prices , a price for 
 44 Campden people” and a price for 44 Guild people.” 
 
 200 
 
to get except by special favour, and where the only 
 bacon the cottager could procure was Chicago tinned 
 stuff from the village store, — and that was before the 
 American meat scandals. We may have to readjust 
 our ideas of exchange in reference to English agri- 
 culture, we may find that economic exchange of 
 agricultural produce must be distinguished from 
 agriculture as a basic craft ; and as a basic craft it is 
 as I have insisted, the counterpart of the Arts and 
 Crafts, the work of the hand shop as distinct from 
 the factory. The agriculturalist and the Craftsman 
 indeed are in the same boat, the key to their joint 
 position is not primarily the marketing of produce 
 but the maintaining of life ; to enable this to be 
 done some change in the existing system is needed. 
 The lesson that the Guild has really learned from its 
 six years in the country, is that “ Art is by the way,” 
 that it will come of itself all right if the fundamentals 
 are first provided. In and through the country we have 
 discovered what these fundamentals are, and also that 
 much of the great town that we thought so essential 
 can be dispensed with, is no more needed, must indeed 
 in a properly regulated State be destroyed. It is the 
 directness of the workshop of craftsmanship combined 
 with the directness of the processes of husbandry that 
 has brought us to this conclusion. The Guild has 
 learned another lesson also, viz., that the weekly wage 
 system which is incompatible with permanence & 
 tradition in craftsmanship , is incompatible also 
 with the processes of husbandry . A man must, if 
 he is to till a piece of land, be able to look not a week 
 but a year ahead, he must be given the necessary sense 
 of permanence and security. While therefore we 
 have no right to speak for others, we are justified in 
 laying down for our own guidance, for those who 
 work at such Arts and Crafts as are best carried on in 
 
the Country, the lines upon which a combination 
 between agriculture and craftsmanship can be arrived at. 
 The following proposals are offered as showing the 
 direction in which it is probable that the Guildsmen 
 will work in the next few years, with a view to 
 acquiring that economic basis for the crafts at which 
 we must aim. 
 
 1. The working craftsman who has determined 
 
 to stay in the country shall have another 
 string to his bow in the form of a 
 basic operation on the land. 
 
 2. This in itself is not sufficient to make the 
 
 basic craft effective ; it must be developed 
 co-operatively among all the Guildsmen & 
 such others as they may from time to time 
 elect into their number. 
 
 3. The principle upon which this co-operation 
 
 should be carried on must be the principle 
 of sustenance, not exchange. That is to say 
 the men should roughly plan out at the 
 beginning of the year, what is to be grown 
 on all the plots and pieces of land, they 
 should then each use his own produce for 
 his own domestic use, and exchange, except 
 perhaps among their own number, should be 
 marginal. 
 
 4. To enable every man to reap the full benefit 
 
 of his own labour, produce and harvesting, 
 the greatest latitude should be given ; to 
 this end it might be desirable to establish a 
 system of tokens, with a bank or clearing 
 house for their exchange. The division of 
 profits would thus be upon each man’s 
 
 202 
 
earnings and sales, and in accordance with 
 the number of tokens handed in.* 
 
 5. Th is plan would give the maximum scope 
 
 for private industry and thrift. Also it 
 would make it possible for such craftsmen 
 as have not yet homes of their own, who 
 do not want to work at the basic craft, or 
 who are earning high and permanent 
 wages, to reap the benefit of the co-operation 
 and on their side assist the society. 
 
 6. One of the group would have to be distributor 
 
 of the marginal produce, and direct the 
 exchange, no doubt receiving the middle- 
 man’s commission for so doing. 
 
 7. With this it would be desirable to combine a 
 
 co-operative distributive store of the usual 
 type in order to save for the producer a 
 portion of the distributor’s profit, which the 
 producer with a little organization might 
 easily retain for himself. 
 
 8. The market should be kept as stable and 
 
 uncompetitive as possible, and regular fixed 
 prices be arranged for, if that could be done. Y 
 
 The above are an outline of the proposals. They 
 postulate an existing body of producers in craftsman- 
 ship who are accustomed to work together, a certain 
 amount of existing custom in the Arts & CYafts, the 
 use of a certain amount of machinery for the rougher 
 work, such as the circular saw, band saw, planing 
 machine and lathes, a certain amount of land, and the 
 
 * See also the excellent system advocated in Montagu Fordhairi s 
 “ Mother Earth.” 
 
 f This seems to have been done by Mr. Vincent in Sussex , see his 
 pamphlet on small holdings. 
 
 203 
 
necessary cottages. Most of these we have; my 
 further proposals for securing the basic industry will 
 take time ; they may be wrong, but it is probable that 
 our people will try them and so little by little build 
 up, or show how there might be built up again in 
 this country a genuine “ ackerbau ” or system of 
 husbandry through the medium of the Arts & Crafts. 
 On page 205 will be seen examples of jewellery and 
 enamel, and on pp. 207 & 209 examples of silver- 
 smithing made by some of the Guild Craftsmen, men 
 of high technical skill, all of whom till a certain 
 amount of land, and are thus already working at the 
 basic industry as well as at their craft. 
 
 Here then is the agricultural side of our problem of 
 craftsmanship, the other string to the bow, the basic 
 craft. Let us now illustrate and examine these prac- 
 tical proposals and show their bearing upon the Arts 
 and Crafts as a whole ; we shall find it to be one of 
 extraordinary intimacy. Architects and craftsmen 
 have in the last 25 years proved that by building up 
 an organization within the Industrial system, however 
 severe the handicap and however insecure the economic 
 basis, they can practise their Arts and Crafts in the 
 great town ; another 25 years and they may be able 
 to prove it in the country too, and then, who knows, 
 we may even destroy London and Birmingham ! 
 
 We claim indeed to have proved more than the mere 
 fact that we are able thus in spite of Industrial 
 machinery to carry our work through, we claim to 
 have shown the fundamental need not only of estab- 
 lishing the Arts and Crafts once again as a factor in 
 national life, but the need of definitely dissociating 
 them from machine production, and of regulating 
 and limiting the machine accordingly. What still 
 remains to be proven is that their organization under 
 healthy country conditions is economically right . 
 
 204 
 
Examples of Jewelry made by Craftsmen who are also engaged upon 
 their own tillage. 
 
 205 
 
At first sight this seems to give the lie to that 
 Socialistic state, that State interference, to which so 
 many allusions have been made in these pages ; but 
 we who are working at the problem practically do 
 not think so. The State interference which we 
 demand is freedom from the rule of finance, we ask 
 for the right to labour, for that “security to the results 
 of enterprise” which Mr. Balfour insists* it is the 
 “ primary duty of a Government to give.” 
 
 The problem of the Arts and Crafts then and the 
 problem of Agriculture, regarded as sustenance and 
 not as exchange, are the counterpart to each other. 
 Let us now examine this from other points of view. 
 To do this I will ask the reader to return to the 
 theorem of the electric light fitting on p. 25 the 
 piece of craftsmanship, as distinct from the mechani- 
 cal product, of which the fair retail price was £7 and 
 the market value after a short period was 12/6. We 
 dealt with it then as a question affecting the share- 
 holder and financier ; let us now look at it again 
 from the point of view of the craftsman, whom in 
 the end it most affects. The electric light fitting, it 
 will be remembered, was only a type of the hand 
 product, the same arbitrary destruction of value could 
 be shown to apply to a tea-pot, a chair, a hand 
 printed book, a jewel, almost any craftsmanship that 
 can be mentioned, with perhaps the exception of 
 building, where the value is partially maintained be- 
 cause of the land upon which the building stands. 
 My experience as an architect and builder however 
 is that even in building, with few exceptions, the 
 better the work is, the less saleable it becomes. 
 Consequently the man who stocks houses , usually 
 called the speculative builder, as others stock furni- 
 ture , silverwork , or items of craftsmanship , gets 
 * See Chapter XII. p. 157 . 
 
 206 
 
207 
 
under existing conditions a better return from bad 
 work than from good. 
 
 Our theorem of the electric light fitting shows 
 conclusively that it is impossible for the Craftsman to 
 carry his own stock, i.e ., he cannot do this and live. 
 It may be possible for him to make one fio piece 
 of work or even two, to show the excellence of his 
 craftsmanship, but if the customer then comes along 
 and says beneficently, “ For the privilege of selling this 
 
 piece to me for 2 5/ its proper market value you know 
 
 — you must now forego one month’s wages,” which, 
 calculated at his working wage of 35/- a week, 
 represents the difference between the market value & 
 the cost of production, it is obviously equivalent 
 to a month’s starvation for the craftsman before the 
 next piece can be started. 
 
 Clearly then if he cannot make stock he must have 
 some other source of livelihood which shall render it 
 possible for him to tide over, and command the fair 
 price for his labour in craftsmanship. I submit that 
 the answer to this is the land, some such system for 
 controlling the produce of the land and using it for 
 the craftsman’s own subsistence as has been outlined 
 above. And at this point it is necessary to emphasize 
 again the sharp distinction between the workshop of 
 craftsmanship & the industrial workshop, the factory; 
 to show how different is their bearing upon the 
 agricultural problem. The factory must work to 
 regular hours and routine ; the Craftsman on the 
 other hand has control over his own time, not being 
 tied to Industrial machinery, he can follow the times 
 and seasons of the year, he can squat on his work. 
 
 We will now bring the point home in another way 
 and from conditions in foreign countries. Here is 
 yet a further practical example, this time from the 
 Guild’s carving shop. In 1904 the Guild carvers 
 208 
 
Examples of Si her smithing by Craftsmen also engaged upon 
 their own tillage. 
 
 o 
 
 209 
 
were asked to do a statue in wood for an English 
 Church. The commission hung in the balance for a 
 time, between the carvers at Campden or the carvers 
 in Bavaria. The architect pleaded for the carvers 
 at Campden, because they could do the work 
 better. The customer pointed out however that the 
 carvers in Bavaria could do the work cheaper by at 
 least 25 per cent. Finally the Campden carvers got 
 the work, provided that a certain price was not ex- 
 ceeded. This meant that the client paid a little more 
 for the privilege of better workmanship, and the 
 Campden carvers forwent their profit for the privi- 
 lege of getting the commission. So far so good, but 
 what puzzled us was how, other things being equal, 
 the Bavarian carvers should be able to put a statue 
 on the English market, carriage included, at 25 per 
 cent, less than the English workman. I had been to 
 Bavaria, and from a superficial visit to the country it 
 had seemed to me that there was no great difference 
 between the standard of life of the Bavarian and the 
 Campden workman. The unexpected visit of two 
 Bavarian architects to Campden to study English 
 Arts and Crafts for their government just after the 
 statue was completed, cleared up the difficulty. 
 
 “ The art of our carvers is abominable ” said they 
 with Teutonic directness, the word used was 
 “ scheusslich,” “ and you deserve to have the statue, 
 but our people have great technical skill, and they 
 have two immense advantages over yours which will 
 always make it possible for them to • beat yours in 
 price. They have their own little land and homestead, 
 and they get their material for nothing. When we 
 have learned the Arts and Crafts from you, we shall 
 be able to wipe you out altogether ; that is one of the 
 objects of our visit to Campden.” 
 
 It transpired upon further questioning that the 
 210 
 
A Carved and Coloured Wooden Statue (St. Benedict) to 
 illustrate the competition of the Campden Carvers with the 
 Bavarian Carvers who have their own “ Ackerbau. >, 
 
 O 2 
 
 21 I 
 
Bavarian carver’s homestead meant sufficient land to 
 grow vegetables and corn for his own consumption, 
 that the craft of baking was still practised by the 
 women of the house, that they kept a pig and perhaps 
 cows for which they had some rights of common 
 pasture, that they did not sell their agricultural 
 produce, as the Englishman does at a loss but ate it 
 themselves. And that last and most important of all 
 an intelligent State seeing that here was the basis of a 
 useful and healthy country industry which it was 
 undesirable to sweep into the great town, had stepped 
 in and impropriated the old manorial rights of cutting 
 timber, reserving them primarily for the industry and 
 no longer allowing the strongest man in the district 
 to do it any way he liked. 
 
 “ Why cannot you do the same ? ” said my guests, 
 “ if you want to be even with us you will have to, 
 there is surely land about here, and there must be 
 manorial rights ; — there have been manorial rights in 
 Europe everywhere, what’s become of yours ?” Most 
 Germans are educated historians. I hushed him with 
 bated breath ; to whisper such a thing in an English 
 country district, would be regarded as wild & wicked 
 Socialism, a scandalous interference with the “ sacred 
 rights of property.” I merely said that with us the 
 land was difficult to get except in large quantities, 
 that all common pasture had been destroyed by the 
 Enclosure Acts of the 1 8th and 19th centuries, and 
 that manorial rights for cutting timber now resolved 
 themselves into a few bundles of faggots down the 
 road a mile away, the timber itself being cut for the 
 private use of the Lord of the Manor, “ and I’ve no 
 doubt,” I added, with English doggedness, “ he makes 
 very good use of it.” My persistent Teuton smiled. 
 “ I observed when in your workshop,” said he, ct that 
 you have to buy your timber from us in Austria ! ” 
 
Silver Cup with Modelling and Chasing, made by the young 
 Guildsman to whon special reference is made on p. 214 . 
 
 -13 
 
The case of our wooden statue was given to show the 
 advantage of the “ ackerbau.” On the preceding 
 page is a silver cup, a rather tragic example of waste, 
 owing to the non-existence of the “ ackerbau.” This 
 beautiful piece with its delicately modelled figure 
 was made by a young guildsman who died of 
 phthisis. He was one of the finest modellers 
 I ever came across, his touch was exquisite. I 
 made his acquaintance first in 1888 in Whitechapel, 
 where he was earning 1 5/- a week by trundling a cats- 
 meat barrow. He came to the School of Handicraft 
 in the evenings, and I was struck with the extra- 
 ordinary fidelity and feeling with which he made a 
 copy of the St. Cecilia of Donatello. We then took 
 him into the Guild and put him on to modelling & 
 chasing in silver, and the Guild still has many beauti- 
 ful patterns from his hand. In 1901 his lungs gave 
 way, and I sent him with his work into the country, 
 but he came back after a few months ; without his 
 shopmates and away from the Guild life, he could 
 not stand the loneliness. He died the year after we 
 came to Campden. Had we gone out a few years 
 earlier I am convinced that his life could have been 
 saved. This case is one of many that could be given 
 and it is offered here as an example of waste. I have 
 had among the young fellows who have passed 
 through my hands some six or seven cases of phthisis, 
 several of which have ended in early death. It is a 
 curious thing, perhaps there is some scientific reason 
 for it, and it is not coincidence, but in almost 
 every case these young men have been men of 
 delicate creative temperament, they have had 
 some quality in them which made of them 
 fine craftsmen in the particular fines which 
 they took up. It should be possible for these 
 people to work in the country at their crafts, and we 
 214 
 
may reasonably claim that it is the duty of our legis- 
 lators, especially of our municipal legislators, to see 
 that this is done. I think there should be country 
 annexes to our great polytechnics and schools of craft, 
 country scholarships, and a regular system of planting 
 people out. What we of the Guild have done in a 
 small way could easily be done by the Community 
 in a large. 
 
 Perhaps when some of our Socialistic theorists become 
 a little more practical, and give up regarding the 
 factory system as the be-all and end-all of the labour 
 state, they will devote a little thought to this question. 
 If they will not turn their attention to Art and Craft 
 for its own sake, they might turn their attention to 
 phthisis, and find in Art and Craft as I would see it, 
 i.e., in small healthy country hand workshops, a solution 
 to one of the most terrible problems of the factory 
 system in the great town.* 
 
 How then it may next be asked, are the first steps 
 best taken to make the “ ackerbau ” through the 
 Arts and Crafts a thing of practical possibility over 
 the whole country. Is there any machinery existing 
 through which it might be worked ? In my view 
 the organization of the “ Home Arts and Industries 
 Association,” which has behind it a long record of 
 excellent work in many English counties, might be 
 used as a jumping off* point. But its scope would 
 have to be widened & its work become more serious 
 and thorough. Without in any way underrating the 
 enthusiasm, and the labour of love that has been 
 bestowed upon the “ Home Arts and Industries ” 
 movement, or without belittling the social work it 
 does in many English villages, most artists and crafts- 
 men feel that there is a want of earnestness about it, 
 
 * See Chapter XIII , p. 174 . 
 
 215 
 
it is not large and direct enough in conception, it is 
 too amateurish, it has too much of patronage, its 
 bearing upon life is too trifling. If it could be so 
 widened as to introduce the real occupations of the 
 home, and if the standard of the little Arts and Crafts 
 it practises could be raised, it would have a much 
 greater value in National life. A little more dairy 
 produce and poultry, and baking of bread, and a 
 little less fretwork and bent iron knick-knacks, 
 would be of much more real value to those 
 whom it seeks to serve ; and this would lead 
 in the end to greater results for the Arts 
 and Crafts as a whole and for life in the country. It 
 is difficult moreover to quite meet the criticism made 
 by a London artisan who saw how his own wages 
 were being reduced by amateur competition. “Selling 
 the produce of village classes,” he said, “ makes it 
 possible for agricultural wages to be kept down, because 
 the villagers are enabled to work for less money 
 at their own work by doing the labour of others, 
 which others can do better than they.” 
 
 What we have to aim at is self dependence for the 
 labourer, for the husbandman, for the craftsman ; that, 
 it seems to me, should be the objective of the 
 “ ackerbau ” through the Arts and Crafts, not the 
 increase of a money wage ; and to do this, the basic 
 crafts must be encouraged again and not the triviali- 
 ties of the fashionable drawing room. It is ridiculous 
 that children of the village should be taught to make 
 bric-a-brac when the fundamental needs of the home, 
 cooking, baking, laundry, needlework, carpentry and 
 the simplest forms of husbandry remain unlearned. 
 
 In this village there are women who spend from 30 per 
 cent, to 50 per cent, of the weekly wages their husbands 
 bring home, in buying bread from the baker. Why 
 should they not bake themselves ? It is the very 
 216 
 
rarest thing for the woman now to bake in the 
 home, the craft like so many others is almost extinct. 
 No doubt the enclosure of Commons, the gradual 
 absorption of all the land by the big people, and the 
 reduction of the labourer to the status of the casual 
 has led to the destruction of the craft as a home 
 craft. Yet in most of the old cottages I have handled 
 in Gloucestershire, and I have reconstructed some 20 
 or 30, I have usually found an oven, as a rule walled 
 up in the 1 8th or 19th century. Baking, like 
 cooking, should be regarded as one of the funda- 
 mental crafts, and should be taught again in the schools, 
 until such time as it is once more practised in the 
 home, and with baking we should set all the simple 
 processes of husbandry, but with this definite objective, 
 self dependence, not wage earning. It is probable 
 that out of such simple facts — facts at which our 
 study of the Arts and Crafts in their relation to 
 agriculture brings us — that a wider national policy 
 may be evolved which will make the great industrial 
 centres have their own markets, wherefrom to 
 draw, and which will make it possible for the 
 villages once again to be self dependent and to have 
 a life of their own that shall not be at the mercy of 
 the great city and of cosmopolitan finance. 
 
 It is impossible to close this Chapter without putting 
 one more question. Is the power that at present 
 rules the countryside to be the chief factor in its 
 reconstruction ? Is the country gentleman going to 
 help or hinder us in our effort at rebuilding the 
 “ ackerbau,” the system of husbandry, through the 
 Arts and Crafts ? 
 
 The country gentleman knows that as long as he can 
 command the country polls he is safe ; but how long 
 is this likely to last ? The gradual sapping of the 
 country by the town, the gradual drifting from the 
 
 217 
 
one into the other of all its best vitality, the passing 
 of craft after craft out of every countryside and its 
 reduction to a condition of parasitism, can only end in 
 leaving the country gentleman, and his allied farmers, 
 if indeed it leave them, without such backing in the 
 country as will make it possible to meet the impending 
 attack of Social Democracy. That this attack should 
 be made without full understanding of country con- 
 ditions and with all the narrow prejudices of the town 
 would be disastrous, and yet that is an imminent 
 national danger. 
 
 At the election of 1905 a cartoon went the round of 
 the countryside and helped the Liberal candidate to a 
 great many of the votes that won him his seat. The 
 cartoon represented a badly drawn but very patient 
 ass bearing the legend “ the land of England.” Upon 
 its back sat three men, the first in front smoked a 
 cigar and wore a coronet, he impersonated the wicked 
 landlord. The second was holding on, if somewhat 
 uncomfortably, for he was depicted as taking up more 
 room on the ass’s back than the joint occupation 
 warranted, in fact he was a little too stout for the 
 seat ; he was the big farmer. The last figure was 
 slipping off the ass’s tail. From the mouth of each, 
 in the Rowlandson and Gillray manner issued a scroll. 
 The first said, “ I’m all right as long as they don’t tax 
 ground rents ; ” the second said, “ I’m ail right as long 
 as they don’t raise the rates,” but the third said, 
 “ Please what’s to come of me ?” The political sting 
 to the cartoon was given by an extract from a speech 
 of the late Lord Beaconsfield, in which he compared 
 the land of England to the beast of burden bearing on 
 its back, three people, and predicted that possibly 
 some day one of them might be slipping off* 
 
 * See also Lieut. -Col. Pedder s significant book “ Where men 
 decay , a survey of present rural conditions, 1908 /’ 
 
 " 218 
 
Power at the hustings is in cartoons, not in statistics, 
 but the fundamental statistics of the district in which 
 the cartoon carried weight are those that tell the story 
 of the agricultural casual, the product of Industrial 
 machinery ; these statistics, which the farmers them- 
 selves supply, show that the average of permanent 
 employment per acreage is one “ signed on ” man to 
 every i oo acres of land. It is owing to such conditions 
 that a rebuilding of the “ ackerbau ” is perhaps not 
 only possible but necessary. 
 
 The points we have considered in this Chapter may 
 be now resumed as follows. First that agriculture, or 
 should we not use the more fitting word husbandry, 
 and the Arts and Crafts are necessary counterparts of 
 each other ; secondly that agriculture, except in so far 
 as the great industrial centres are concerned, should 
 be regarded from the point of view of sustenance and 
 not of exchange. Thirdly that just as a delimitation 
 of machinery is inevitable to check industrial waste, 
 so also is there likely to follow a similar delimitation 
 of agriculture for home service, for sustenance, as 
 distinct from exchange. 
 
 The idea may be a fantastic one, but it is worth 
 considering, that the problem of how to save English 
 agriculture, and how to find their economic basis for 
 the Arts and Crafts may in the end turn out to be 
 the same. 
 
 219 
 
CHAPTER XVI. THE FUTURE OF THE 
 GUILD OF HANDICRAFT AS A FACT & 
 AS AN IDEA. 
 
 The object of these pages has been to show that the 
 carrying through of the experiment of the Guild in 
 the country in the manner its promoters had hoped 
 was premature ; that the thing can be done, but not 
 yet ; that we must wait until the public thought & 
 the public conscience are a little more with us. The 
 Arts and Crafts, it would seem, cannot be perma- 
 nently carried on , on any large scale, where the com- 
 munity s first concern is to exploit them for profit. 
 The realization of this fact is a matter of time. 
 
 For the understanding too of the practical difficulties 
 that lie in the way, we must, in my opinion, look to 
 two forces in the community ; to the more intelligent 
 type of craftsman who understands workshop condi- 
 tions, and with him the amateur who is beginning to 
 learn what craftsmanship means ; and also to the 
 more intelligent of the country gentry, those who 
 live less in town and more in the country, those 
 particularly who have roots in the country and are 
 capable of seeing what is going on and where we are 
 drifting to, and whose horizon is not limited by the 
 need for rushing about in motor cars and the shooting 
 of rabbits and partridges. 
 
 With regard to the country gentry their power for 
 good is as great as their power for passive resistance, 
 but until they can take a more serious view of life & 
 their obligations as citizens, until in short they are 
 prepared to work in a more cultured and intelligent 
 manner, we shall make but little progress. Will 
 220 
 
they do this ? The privilege of gentility must be 
 paid for by intelligent sacrifice, but we shall have to 
 give up a good many of our present false standards of 
 life and most of our silly class prejudices. The spirit 
 of my dream of a reconstructed countryside is best 
 expressed in the Will of Cecil Rhodes where he re- 
 pudiates the loafer, and at the same time insists that 
 so much of the best work in England has been done, 
 and must continue to be done, by an intelligent landed 
 gentry. The attack of Socialism will be largely, if 
 indirectly, an attack upon the country gentleman, 
 but the attack can be warded off by accepting the 
 gospel of work, and by differentiating in our legisla- 
 tion, between the workers and the idlers ; between 
 the people that live their lives and the absentees ; 
 between those that perform intelligent public service 
 and those that play or muddle their lives away. 
 
 As for the immediate & practical side of the experi- 
 ment with which we have here dealt, it is no good 
 knocking your head against a brick wall; and since 
 it has been definitely shown that it is impossible to 
 carry on Arts and Crafts upon any large scale, under 
 existing industrial conditions, we must set to and 
 devise other ways in which the work we want to do 
 can be done. People may be sympathetic and help- 
 ful, but when you have lost their money in social 
 experiment, however ultimately successful, they do 
 not usually lend you any more ; they look to others 
 to take a turn. When, moreover, you have come to 
 the conclusion, after 2 1 years’ careful & close experi- 
 ment, that “ Arts and Crafts” cannot be permanently 
 conducted upon “business lines,” i.e.^ cannot be 
 carried on so as to pay interest on capital and be 
 profit bearing, you have to turn about & think out 
 new ways in which they can be carried on. 
 
 That is :the position in which the members of the 
 
 221 
 
Guild of Handicraft, like many others who practise 
 the Arts and Crafts, at present find themselves. The 
 various suggestions, that in this book have been 
 made for modifying social conditions in the interest 
 of Arts and Crafts, & the finer social life they postu- 
 late, will take many years to bring about, perhaps for 
 the most part they will never be realized in the ways 
 in which they have been outlined ; it remains then 
 for those who practise the Arts and Crafts to shape 
 for themselves ways in which they can get their work 
 done & lead the lives they want to lead, as best they 
 can. We need not cry for the moon, but the Utopia 
 of a saner social legislation may be nearer than we 
 think, and whether it be or not, we may take com- 
 fort by always remembering that the best work is the 
 work that is done by personal effort & energy, & that 
 the individual eludes every system, however perfect, 
 however rotten. 
 
 William Morris once said that our greatest standby 
 as craftsmen was the knowledge that we were hand- 
 ing down the golden chain of the Arts to some greater 
 period that we ourselves should never see. May-be 
 the view from the Pisgah heights is finer to some who 
 have longer sight than to others ; also there is happi- 
 ness & stimulus in it, as in any far looking out. But 
 the immediate issue is always with us, & the imme- 
 diate issue for the members of the Guild of Handicraft 
 who have decided to see their little venture through, 
 in the country, under such new conditions as are 
 possible, may be summed as follows : — To surmount 
 the rent difficulty by securing their workshops ; to 
 circumvent the difficulty of obtaining such fresh 
 Capital as they may need to enable them to continue 
 their work ; and to make some arrangement for 
 finding a basic occupation on the land, & doing this 
 co-operatively with a view to having another string 
 222 
 
to their bow. The first of these difficulties we hope 
 to get over by forming a small group of existing 
 shareholders or others into a trust for acquiring the 
 buildings and plant, and leasing them to the men 
 direct for purposes of Arts and Crafts. The second 
 will be more difficult to do, but we may be able to 
 build up gradually some body of patrons out of our 
 clientele, who will, in the manner indicated before, 
 & by means of annual subscription and regular 
 exhibitions, take good work in kind or allow it to be 
 made for them. Also we may gradually persuade 
 some of the more advanced municipalities to co- 
 operate with us in the planting out of craftsmen into 
 the country. The third, the basic operation on the 
 land for sustenance, not exchange, I have already 
 outlined in the last Chapter ; its realization must be a 
 matter of practical experiment. 
 
 These difficulties may take many years to surmount, 
 and hence it will mean for our little society that it 
 will have consciously to abandon Standard, for unless 
 and until our craftsmen can find that economic basis 
 that will enable them to do the best work only, they 
 will have to work at their crafts for the Trade, or as 
 best they can. It will mean too that the co-operative 
 principle will be in abeyance, though it may not 
 inconceivably be replaced by a larger and more effective 
 co-operation through a union of little masters, who 
 may also combine for the distribution of agricultural 
 surplus. My hope and belief, however, is that the 
 men who have adapted themselves to so many chang- 
 ing conditions, will devise the way, and that they will 
 use the good name of the Guild under which they 
 will continue to be united, for such work only where 
 some guarantee of Standard can be arrived at. I 
 have confidence in these men, and with any luck, or 
 even moderate success in pulling their little businesses 
 
 223 
 
through they will each in their respective crafts carry 
 to a finer issue the traditions of the Guild. There 
 will be others too, younger ones to join them.* 
 
 So much for the fact ; now for the Idea. How is this 
 best to be summed ? That Standard of work and 
 Standard of life are one ; that beauty of work and 
 goodness are for the craftsman best expressed in the 
 making of things that are serviceable; that this implies 
 the acceptance by the Community of Standard as a 
 working principle, with its concomitant, the control 
 and regulation of machinery ; that the recognition of 
 Standard excludes the possibility of economic waste; 
 and that the Socialistic State or the State at which 
 we are aiming is not possible without the recognition 
 of Standard. 
 
 These are some of the aspects of the idea, which has 
 formed itself out of the 21 years of the Guild’s life — 
 out of its effort to embody the Arts and Crafts 
 movement. To put the matter from another point 
 of view we might express it thus. Most people, 
 whether they be Socialists or Tariff Reformers, or 
 both, or neither, are probably agreed that one of the 
 greatest problems before the Country is the problem 
 of unemployment. This problem is not an English 
 one alone, all industrial countries have to face it. 
 What is the cause of it ? what is it due to ? 
 Economists and politicians give various answers but 
 the Arts and Crafts have an answer of their own. 
 They may or may not be right, but it is this. 
 
 There is not enough work to go round because the 
 bulk of the work is done by industrial machinery, & 
 much of it badly so done ; moreover the fresh inven- 
 tions of men, and the labours of their hands, are per- 
 petually being taken from them and exploited by 
 those who have capital and are thus able to control 
 
 * See Appendix V. “ The Guild Roll for 2 1 years.” 
 
 224 
 
industrial machinery. In addition to the fact of this 
 immense output of industrial machinery, which is 
 more and more displacing human labour, there is the 
 further fact that, owing to the absence of Standard, 
 50 per cent, of the output is not wanted, is wasteful, 
 is non-productive, that is to say, it not only dis- 
 places work that is life-giving and useful, but it 
 employs men in other work that is life-destroying 
 and useless. 
 
 The solution to the problem then, as contributed by 
 the Arts and Crafts, and as offered in these pages, 
 where neither the Socialistic nor the Tariff Reform 
 proposals are accepted without qualification, is that 
 a line must be drawn between the industrial and 
 the non-industrial, between the basic & the personal 
 productions of men, that the one shall not be allowed 
 to trench upon the other, that the best way to do this is 
 to accept the Collectivist principle within certain limi- 
 tations, and in so doing again make it possible for the 
 craftsman to put his labour at the service of the 
 Community. In short to free him from the pre- 
 carious weekly wage-dependence, which at present 
 makes his work impossible. 
 
 From the point of view of the Arts and Crafts the 
 industrial system is wasteful, because it is not giving 
 to the Community what it needs, in distinction to 
 what it “ wants,” and because at the same time it is 
 making it impossible for those who could give it to 
 do so. Until this fundamental wastefulness is realized, 
 we of the Arts and Crafts believe that neither the 
 Socialist nor the Tariff Reformer will solve the 
 problem of unemployment , That this point of view 
 is a right one, this idea a sound one, the Guild 
 from its experience claims to have proved. 
 
 The claim to the establishment of a truth rests, it 
 will be urged, not upon the success or failure of one 
 
 225 
 
or even a hundred experiments ; but it was suggested 
 recently by a member of the Guild of Handicraft that 
 the time had come for writing the history of the 
 Guilds in England at the close of the 19th century. 
 An account, in other words, of those organizations 
 within the State that are seeking to clarify its Industry, 
 to establish the fact that production is a social duty, to 
 set a Standard for its life & craftsmanship. The 
 principle of voluntary association which had built 
 up the civilization of Hellas &c Mediaeval London, 
 & which Prince Kropotkin calls “ mutual aid,” was 
 again expressing itself as “ a factor in evolution ” ; 
 & the current of men’s minds was turning towards 
 these young efforts at reconstructing the State from 
 within. Perhaps the suggestion was a sound one, & 
 somebody with the necessary knowledge & sympathy 
 may think it worth while to carry it out ; but with 
 a view to determining here what is fact and what is 
 idea, in the specific effort with which this book deals, 
 I would like to quote an extract from the little code 
 of rules which the workmen of the Guild of Handi- 
 craft drew up among themselves in the year 1899, a 
 year after the formation of the company. They felt 
 that as Incorporation under the Companies’ Act 
 stultified all the old regulations for mutual order & 
 workshop discipline which they had so long been 
 working on, a fresh' code was desirable, & they 
 divided it into two : rules by which they were bound 
 under the company’s Articles of Association, and 
 cc Guild rules ” which they could make or unmake 
 themselves. This book of rules they printed at their 
 own cost, & a copy was given to each newly-elected 
 Guildsman. It opened thus : — 
 
 “ The Guild of Handicraft is a body of men of different trades, 
 crafts and occupations, united together on such a basis as shall 
 better promote both the goodness of the work produced and the 
 
 226 
 
standard of life of the producer. To this end it seeks to apply to the 
 collective work of its members whatever is wisest and best in the 
 principles of Co-operation, of Trade Unionism or of the modern 
 revival of Art and Craft, and to apply these in such manner as changing 
 circumstances permit or as shall be most helpful to its individual 
 members. 
 
 “The Guild was founded in the year 1888 and conducted for ten 
 years as a private industrial partnership, all the members who were 
 duly elected into the Guild being from the time of their election 
 jointly liable with the founder for all they had. But in 1898 in order 
 to limit the liability, the business was re-constructed. With a view to 
 safeguarding the old spirit, the old rights, and the old privileges, the 
 former governing body of the Guild was retained but given a definite 
 status. Its objects therefore remain the same as of old, viz., to do 
 good work, and to do it in such a way as shall best conduce to the 
 welfare of the workman. And as there are many means that help to 
 this end besides the mere labour in the workshop, so the Guild also 
 seeks to aid its members in such ways as the following. To pay no 
 less than the minimum trade union rate of wages when such exists. 
 To afford to the workmen such facilities for improving his position & 
 powers as shall from time to time seem best, seeing that good work 
 and good conditions are inextricably connected. To encourage the 
 holding by the Guildsmen themselves of the capital needed for con- 
 ducting the business to the end they may some day become the sole 
 owners. To promote among old or young the study of good crafts- 
 manship by means of technical classes or otherwise. To help with a 
 provident fund in sickness or at death. To form at Essex House a 
 library of such works as may be most helpful to its members, and to 
 promote that other side of life, which whether in time of holiday or 
 work, whether in sports, by music, by drama, or any form of Art 
 brings men together and helps them to live in fellowship.” 
 
 Now this recital by the men of the objects of the 
 Guild is surely significant : it not only laid down 
 what had been done, but the ideal at which they 
 aimed, and the important thing to observe is the 
 conscious effort to humanize work, a thing very 
 different, as the shareholder who wrote letter No. 9 
 in the Appendix has pointed out, from humanizing 
 play. Almost all the objects laid down in the above 
 have been carried out, even to the acting of dramas 
 by Ben Jonson, Dekker, Beaumont & Fletcher, or 
 the pensioning of an old Guildsman, one of the 
 
 227 
 
Chartists of ’48, but whose little pension unfortu- 
 nately ceases with the closing of the company.* 
 
 At the conclusion of the rules is what is called the 
 New Guildsman’s clause, & it runs as follows : — 
 
 “ Inasmuch as membership in the Guild of Handicraft gives a man 
 greater privileges than he can receive in any ordinary shop, makes him 
 part owner of his workshop, gives him a voice in the government, a 
 nomination on the Board, an appeal, a holding in the capital, and a 
 share in such profits as it may be decided yearly to divide, together 
 with such other benefits as may appear recorded above ; so more is 
 demanded of him in return. He is expected to take more responsi- 
 bility for his work, to be thrifty of appliances and of time, to bear his 
 part with more thoughtfulness in the life of the whole concern, and 
 to help in making more perfect that organization which, in an 
 undertaking inspired by the newer ideals of Labour and practical 
 co-operation takes the place of the master’s eye.” 
 
 The rules bear the signature of four of the men who 
 served on the committee for drafting them, a cabinet 
 maker who occupied a leading position as organizer of 
 one of the London Trade Unions, a metal worker who 
 is now in charge of the craftsmanship of one of the 
 great northern polytechnics, a blacksmith from Bethnal 
 Green, who was helped to his craft by one of the 
 University settlements, & a compositor from the 
 Kelmscott Press. To the last-named we are all 
 particularly indebted, much of the spirit and thought 
 of the passages quoted is due to him, & it is good to 
 reflect that before he joined the Guild he worked for 
 nearly 20 years with William Morris, and helped him 
 edit the Commonweal , — & thus may some of the 
 
 *This was Reinhart Read , — “ Old Dick Read ” as he was known 
 in the workshop. He died as these sheets were going to press , at 
 the age of 83, and the day after the last payment of his pension 
 was made to him by the Company. He was a fine type of 
 English workman, strong, stern , uncompromising, but very proud, 
 and also very tender to those whom he regarded. He is one of the 
 five cabinet makers mentioned in Sidney Webb's “ History of 
 Trade Unionism ” who went to prison in 1875, and whose 
 courageous action lead to the Repeal of the Criminal Law 
 Amendment Act of 1871. 
 
 228 
 
“ A man , and want wit in extremity ? 
 
 . play the Shoemaker , 
 
 Pull on my shoe.” Act 4, Scene 4. 
 
 From Dekker s “Shoemaker's Holiday” as acted by the Guild in 1908. 
 
master craftsman’s life have passed into the practical 
 shaping of our Guild rules. 
 
 Here again we find the expression of the Idea, the 
 attempt to bring into Industry some of that ethic, 
 some of those Ideals that are making for the recon- 
 struction of the State from within. The Guild’s 
 work, as may be judged by the pictures in these 
 pages, is scattered about all over Europe and America, 
 & it has not been our object here to deal with it from 
 its technical or artistic side. Our purpose has been 
 to consider its economic and ethical aspects, and to 
 show how these & the life, have been & are insepar- 
 ably knit. To the intelligent & thoughtful craftsman 
 indeed these things are his religion, these things are 
 what he makes sacrifices for, & what he dreams 
 about — they personify humanity. His Sabbatarian 
 observance, his pleasure in ritual, his conventions at 
 birth, marriage and burial, are not so real to him, & 
 do not so completely pervade his life as do the 
 economic and ethical aspects of labour. It is here 
 that his Christianity has found itself, here the 
 humanism he has inherited from the Renaissance ; & 
 here too, in a certain fearless stoical regard for the great 
 problems of life, is modern Science as it has so far 
 come to him. 
 
 These things are hard of expression, & to the crafts- 
 man there is the need always of giving them a 
 concrete form. A fine piece of building might do it, 
 a building that has summed in it the labour for many 
 years of many men ; a stray word might do it, or 
 some mark of affection from the finer spirits ; for the 
 rest such an Idea may-be never finds embodiment at 
 all, or passes among men in silence & fulfils itself 
 gradually. To me, perhaps, its completest expression 
 in the life of the Guild is to be found in its Song 
 Book, printed and published by the Essex House 
 230 
 
Press in 1905, and entirely ignored by the general 
 public. Up & down the gamut of human life and 
 thought from childhood to old age they are grouped, 
 these songs of the Guild singers, into ten sections — 
 songs of praise, of comradeship, love and courtship, of 
 loyalty & the land, songs of the sea, songs of the 
 crafts, & many that were written for the singers 
 themselves. Somehow this little book has brought 
 them into touch with the sweetest & the kindliest, 
 the most remote and the most modern, the greatest 
 of the poets and the humblest makers of the folk 
 song, Chaucer and Burns, Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 Dekker and Kipling, David the Psalmist and Purcel 
 are of the company. It has meant a great deal to 
 many who have been of or with the Guild, this little 
 book ; the lyrics from the plays they acted, the 
 rounds and catches that they sang, and the subtle 
 thread that ties it all together is melody, now in the 
 form of plain song, now of chant, chorus, madrigal, 
 now majestic, now burlesque, handled by the skilled 
 musician, or hummed and whistled at the bench. 
 Melody like perfume is remembrance, and it gathers 
 about itself many of the finer, the dearer, the more 
 sacred things of life. 
 
 Such things help the Idea, they lead to the creation of 
 those new centres of organic life which in modern 
 Industry we need, that finer civilization to which 
 reference has so often been made in these pages. 
 Through such things we shall once again get at our 
 lost conception of the dignity of labour, & at the realiza- 
 tion of Democracy. It is such new centres of life that 
 
 we need, that something which we must get at our- 
 selves, that no State legislation can give us. We 
 may as well be honest about it ; not in the State, not 
 in the outside forms, but here at home in the inner- 
 most is it, that Democracy ever breaks down, in 
 
 231 
 
our own incapacity, our own unwillingness to judge 
 of others correctly, to accept others at their real 
 worth. We are always striving for some easy, some 
 plausible, some external or showy standard to gauge 
 excellence by ; does a man wear a golden ruff, a 
 silken hat, are his nails pared, his manners or his 
 boots polished ? The true democrat must not only 
 have the power of reading character, but the much 
 greater power of so effacing himself as to accept 
 every character that he reads sympathetically. Per- 
 haps self-effacement is the wrong word, perhaps the 
 better word were self-assertion, for when a man has 
 won for himself this finer judgment, and has entered 
 into this enjoyment of facing another soul stripped of 
 all externals and emptiness, there begins a striving, a 
 contest, a sort of divine struggle for the mastery. 
 What it is, this indefinable striving for the better by 
 the aid of the good, we cannot say, nor do we know 
 how to define it, but we have seen birds towering to 
 the sky. 
 
 As for our little Guild, perhaps like the spotted snake, 
 it is now changing its skin as in some new spring, or 
 for some fairer brilliancy. Those who are still in it 
 and of it fully know its limitations, its difficulties, its 
 failures. They know that the work they have set 
 their hands to is a sound work ; that much of what 
 they have done has had real value, that many things 
 have not turned out as they had desired. They hope 
 that the economic changes they believe to be in sight, 
 will help and not mar their work, while as for the 
 immediate readjustment of the little undertaking 
 which has called forth this book, it is but an episode 
 in the greater movement of the Arts and Crafts 
 in Modern Industry — what does it matter ! When 
 the heap of the ants is overturned, there is a momen- 
 tary confusion, and then the pile begins again. 
 
 232 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
APPENDIX I. 
 
 The upward grade of the business for the first 15 years follows the 
 
 234 
 
curves of 1900 & 1901, the move into the country took place in 1902. 
 
 235 
 
APPENDIX II. 
 
 Mr. Ashbee’s Letter to the Outside Shared- 
 holders IN 1907 AS TO THE RAISING OF FRESH CAPITAL 
 
 “ The annual Balance Sheet of the Guild of Handicraft is being sent 
 to you and to our other shareholders with this. It is not a cheering 
 document for you will see from it that we have made heavy losses. 
 The reasons for these have been indicated in this and the preceding 
 annual reports. 
 
 “In view of the proposal as to the future of the Guild which is being 
 placed by my co-directors and myself before the shareholders, I think 
 it desirable also to add certain considerations personally which perhaps 
 may have weight with you, but which it is not fitting to incorporate in 
 a report which deals solely with the immediate business aspects of the 
 Guild. 
 
 “You are being asked whether you will join with the other share- 
 holders in taking up a certain number of 6 per cent, preference 
 shares, and you will not unnaturally say — ‘ so large a proportion of 
 the money I have already found for this undertaking must be con- 
 sidered as lost, what justification can be shown for this loss, and if I 
 subscribe further what prospects are there that my preference shares 
 will not go the same way ? ’ 
 
 “ A close examination of the Guild’s work and development shows 
 certain important facts that have business and social aspects of no 
 small consequence. 
 
 “ The Guild has been in existence for just 20 years, during the first 15 
 years it has been steadily growing, it also paid a steady 5 per cent, on 
 its invested capital. The period of its losses synchronizes with the 
 removal of its works into the country and the losses are attributable 
 almost entirely to the conditions which working in the country during 
 a period of trade depression has imposed upon us. We had just re- 
 moved our shops in town, laid down our new plant and works, and at 
 much cost and outlay conveyed our workpeople, nearly 150 men, 
 women and children into Campden, when three successive years of 
 serious commercial depression came upon us. We were faced with 
 the alternative of making stock or sacking our workpeople — the 
 strictly business procedure would perhaps have been to take the 
 latter course, but we were precluded from doing this because 
 our business is so largely contingent upon the skill and training 
 of our workpeople, many of whom have been with us from the 
 very beginning, and moreover they are shareholders in the concern. 
 Had we still been in London the difficulty would not have arisen, 
 
 236 
 
for to discharge a man temporarily from a good shop in which he 
 has an interest is not a serious matter if you do not break up his 
 home, but in the country all the other considerations of life 
 enter, viz : his house, his moving expenses, his children’s schooling 
 
 and so forth. Had we discharged our men, we could not possibly 
 have got them back again, now that the trade revival has come. 
 “We adopted the other alternative of making stock, and our loss is 
 largely due to our realizing stock on a falling market. We also, as 
 the balance-sheets show, reduced our wages, and it is gratifying to 
 note that our workpeople accepted this reduction rather than leave 
 us, though in many cases I think that they could have commanded 
 higher wages in town. 
 
 “ The question now arises — is the condition through which we have 
 passed of a kind to recur, and is it therefore wiser to say the thing 
 cannot be done, the works had better close down, and the crafts and 
 the workmen had better be allowed to drift back into the great town, 
 we will not throw good money after bad ? 
 
 “ I think not. That we shall again have depressed trading conditions 
 is certain, but a few years more will see us much stronger to meet 
 them. Already our workpeople are beginning themselves to devise 
 means individually for lessening the strain upon the business in the 
 event of slack times : thus they are combining other operations with 
 their crafts, taking up land, etc. 
 
 “ The handicaps that are imposed upon Country Industries are still 
 enormous, but a progressive legislation and a wiser foresight are little 
 by little lessening them — every year things become easier. Among 
 these better conditions that we believe and hope are likely to come, 
 maybe mentioned — easier railway rates, easier and cheaper telephonic 
 communication, better conditions in the country as to land, and 
 housing and education. 
 
 “ Those of our shareholders who have visited Campden, cannot but 
 have been struck with the successful way in which this body of London 
 workmen have settled down to the problem of the re-adjustment of 
 life in the country, have disposed once for all of the foolish and 
 ignorant argument that the young townsman prefers the gas lights 
 and the Music Hall, — and have shown that if he be given a healthy 
 and sane alternative in the country he infinitely prefers the latter. 
 
 “ The net upshot of the Guild’s work then may be regarded as 
 twofold : — 
 
 ( a ) It has for a period of 20 years produced a high standard 
 of Craftsmanship in a variety of different crafts and much 
 of its production (setting aside qualifications of taste) will, 
 we believe, rank as among the best English work of the 
 last two decades, much of it being already regarded as 
 standard work in this country and abroad ; 
 
 237 
 
(b) It has in the course of this production trained up and 
 developed a body of workmen with a higher standard of 
 life — men who have learned to carry the ideas of their 
 craft into the life they lead. 
 
 “ Incidentally the result of its work has been the revivification of a 
 decaying Gloucestershire village, the building of clean, new houses 
 and workshops, the laying out of gardens and allotments, the employ- 
 ment of a good deal of country labour that would otherwise have 
 drifted into the town, and the establishment of a Higher Education 
 School (The Campden School of Arts and Crafts) under the Glouces- 
 tershire County Council for some 300 men, women and children, that 
 has been very largely run by the workpeople of the Guild. 
 
 “ All these things are at stake if the Guild should be unable to find 
 the fresh capital needed for paying off its bank overdraft. We 
 believe that we have already turned the corner, and that the revival 
 of trade and the new business management that we instituted a year 
 ago, the economies in matter of salaries, premises, etc., that have 
 been effected will produce considerable results next year. 
 
 “ I venture to hope then that though you must necessarily first look 
 upon the question as a business one, you will allow that it has other 
 sides that are not unimportant in modern life, and that you will join 
 the other shareholders who believe in the future of the undertaking, 
 in subscribing for a certain number of preference shares. 
 
 “ Had we been makers of armour plate, or patent medicines, or any 
 other of the much advertised mechanical productions that appear to 
 be among the necessities of Modern Life, our pecuniary results so far 
 might have been different, but as we merely make good things of 
 individual merit, and where reduplication is impossible, cheapness 
 and large profits are not open to us, but we still anticipate once again 
 a steady return on our investment when we have cut our present losses, 
 and when we have adjusted ourselves to our new working conditions ; 
 for the money that has hitherto been paid to our bankers in interest 
 on loan, will in future go' to our preference shareholders in dividend. 
 I myself am one of the principal subscribers, may I hope that you 
 will be another ? 
 
 Yours, &c., 
 
 
 2 38 
 
 / 
 
 oil 
 
Reply No. i. 
 
 “ I cannot afford to find any money from the philanthropic point of 
 view touched upon in your letter, and the experience of the recent 
 working is not otherwise encouraging. If work cannot be found for 
 them in the ordinary course of the business it scarcely seems that a 
 body of workpeople ought to be maintained indefinitely out of the 
 Company’s capital at the risk of its entire disappearance, and if the 
 undertaking cannot be successfully conducted on business lines in the 
 country I really think the attempt ought not to be persisted in. 
 
 “I am sorry that things have not worked out very successfully since 
 the move, but I do venture to urge that this undertaking cannot 
 succeed in the long run unless it is primarily conducted as a purely 
 business concern.” 
 
 Reply No. 2. 
 
 “ Thank you very much for your letter. It is indeed a sad report. I 
 feel that the experiment of the Guild has now been duly tried and has 
 not succeeded. 
 
 “ It is extremely doubtful in my opinion whether the Guild under the 
 present conditions, can ever be a real financial success, and in that 
 case to take these proposed preference shares, would only perhaps 
 postpone the evil day. If the Guild decided to wind up, I would 
 suggest that it should be done gradually so as to avoid a forced sale, 
 and also to give the workmen time to find other employment and 
 homes for their wives and families. If they are skilled men they 
 should have no difficulty in finding work if they are given reason- 
 able time.” 
 
 Reply No. 3. 
 
 “Frankly I have always doubted the benefit of moving the Guild 
 from London, except for the workers. So much of your business was 
 I believe owing to commissions being given by people who like to be 
 in close touch with the producers and in the case of important work 
 like to see it in progress. There is much truth I think in the criticism 
 in Reply 9, and like 1, I hope you will put the undertaking on a purely 
 business footing. I think on the whole that I will take up a few 
 preference shares and enclose the application form.” 
 
 Reply No. 4. 
 
 “ Thank you for your letter about the affairs of the Guild. I am sorry 
 that things are not going as well as they were. Having just promised 
 to invest all my available savings and some prospective ones in the 
 
 239 
 
Oxford Garden Suburb Scheme, I am afraid I cannot afford to take 
 up any considerable amount of the new shares, but I should be willing 
 to take £ . If there is a difficulty in getting your shares taken 
 
 np I might be able to take a few more a little later on.” 
 
 Reply No. 5. 
 
 “ I have been waiting to answer your letter until I received the Annual 
 Balance Sheet ; but that I have not yet got. 
 
 “ I am truly sorry at the report your letter makes ; on personal 
 grounds as regards yourself ; and on public grounds ; for your 
 installation of London works into the country is one of the experiments 
 from which one hoped for permanent success and achievement. 
 
 “ I cannot of course from such meagre knowledge as I possess, form 
 an opinion as to what steps should be taken and will not prejudice 
 the matter by attempting to do so. 
 
 “ When I have seen the Balance Sheet I shall be better able to reply 
 to your appeal about taking up any preference shares. 
 
 “ I am very sorry to think of your having to encounter so much 
 trouble and anxiety.” 
 
 The same writer adds : 
 
 “ Since writing two or three days ago I have received the Annual 
 Report and Balance Sheet. I will do what you ask and take the 
 new preference shares in proportion to my present holding. The 
 position of affairs is not satisfactory but I hope your expectation of 
 improvement will be realised. 
 
 “ I notice at every Exhibition how many products of Handicraft from 
 numerous sources are sent, and it is evident the competition has 
 become very severe.” 
 
 Reply No. 6. 
 
 “ On reading your letter I felt my answer must be no, but on reading 
 the report and accounts and seeing the efforts that have been made 
 to straighten things out, I am willing to find my share of the ^fi,ooo 
 to give the Guild another chance. This appears to be about £ , 
 
 but if others are not able to or do not find their share, I will go to 
 £ , if the whole £ 1,000 is found. I do not desire any shares in 
 
 exchange, but probably you think it convenient to deal with all alike. 
 “ Hoping it will now come round.” 
 
 Reply No. 7. 
 
 “Whilst I must agree that the accounts for 1906 are not cheerful, still 
 I hope you will not be discouraged but will ‘ try another round.’ 
 
 24O 
 
“ I shall be giad to subscribe for £ of the new preference 
 
 shares if that will be of any service. 
 
 “ You have gone into the important question of ‘ running into stock ’ 
 so fully that I need not comment upon it.” 
 
 Reply No. 8. 
 
 “ I have signed the Form of Proxy and sent it. I think the action 
 your Board propose is a wise action and I hope it will give the Guild 
 a good re-start on its way. The Guild deserves to succeed as it has 
 been an unselfish effort from the very beginning. There is a great 
 belief — a current running in the opposite direction to it— as to ‘ chacun 
 pour soi, y but I have a strong conviction that the Guild’s little begin- 
 nings are destined to grow into a big thing and a solution of 
 many problems. 
 
 “ Don’t regret the struggles, there is great truth in ‘ progression by 
 antagonism.’ It has proved itself true throughout history. It purifies 
 effort, gets rid of the dross and hardens mental muscles ! ” 
 
 Reply No. 9. 
 
 “ Many thanks for your letter which is full of interest. I have kept 
 it back a few days waiting for the Guild Accounts which have not yet 
 turned up : however the broad fact is that you have made a loss, and 
 I know the tendency of shareholders to look upon a loss for a year or 
 two as the important factor, it is important of course, but in your 
 case there are other issues which are also important, and they should 
 be fairly stated and considered. 
 
 “Your letter attributes your loss to being obliged to make for stock 
 and then being obliged to sell in a falling market, and you base your 
 hopes for the future in a turn of the market — aided by econo- 
 mies, &c., &c. I don’t think that goes to the root of the matter. 
 
 “ I had a little experience last year in selling several large pieces of 
 furniture made by Morris & Co. The result showed that there is no 
 general public for such things, each individual piece is made for an 
 individual buyer, and probably if Morris & Co. had to make^such 
 things for stock they would soon be in the same hole as you are. 
 They have as the result of a longer existence a considerable and more 
 or less constant demand for certain wall papers and cretonnes, and 
 machine-made carpets and other repeat orders where their prices 
 don’t differ much from those of ordinary commerce. Such orders 
 don’t of course solve the question of finding employment for specially 
 trained cabinet makers, carpet makers, and metal workers, but the 
 profit on them goes to pay expenses at Oxford Street. 
 
 “ The Arts and Crafts movement has not yet got to the point when 
 
 241 
 
 Q 
 
you can go on making specially designed metal work or furniture with 
 the certainty that customers will turn up sooner or later and give you 
 your price, and that therefore the only thing necessary is to have 
 enough capital to hold a big stock in bad times. 
 
 “ I don’t believe you can promise continuity of employment to your 
 folk at Campden on present lines and be sure of a profit. 
 
 “ At the same time I think the community at Campden is an experi- 
 ment of first-rate importance. 
 
 ** Cadbury’s village at Birmingham is excellent as far the cottages and 
 all the life out of business hours goes, but modern conditions of cheap 
 production and the full use of machinery rule supreme in work hours, 
 they have humanised leisure, you have tried to humanise work as well. 
 u Of course modern hurry renders the problem more difficult. If a 
 man could give you a good order he would like it all done in a week if 
 possible, anyway he nearly always wants it as soon as possible ; he 
 won’t let you use it as a sort of balance to go on with in slack times, 
 and put it aside in busy times. Under ordinary conditions of quick 
 delivery you can’t possibly ensure regular and continuous high-class 
 work. The only possible way to find continuous high-class work is 
 to persuade people not to be in a hurry so that you may always see 
 your way at least six months ahead, and regulate vour rate of produc- 
 tion accordingly — under modern conditions I don’t think this is 
 possible. 
 
 “ As an alternative can you find other work for which there is a large 
 and constant demand and which you can produce at a competitive \ 
 
 price ; which your skilled hands would be willing to do at lower 
 wages in their slack time? That is of course what they do in London 
 now. When there is no work for them on their own high-class job, 
 they take a common job at a lower price, and a post card brings them 
 back in a week when you want them. 
 
 “You have not succeeded in producing the right alternative at 
 Campden. You have been making for stock individual things which 
 have no general sale, and which you have had to sell at a loss as if 
 they were ordinary stock patterns. 
 
 “ That I think is the problem. Your raison d' etre is to make first-rate 
 things, each with an individuality ; to do that without sacking your 
 hands in slack times, you must be able alongside this to produce 
 some articles of general demand at a competivive price. Your skilled 
 hands must be content to be shifted from the high wages of the art 
 shop to the lower wages of the trade shop as the exigencies of trade 
 demand. There is no reason why the output of the trade should not 
 be good of its sort — just as Cadbury’s Chocolate is good. Whether 
 such a trade shop can be successfully run, and what it should turn out, 
 are questions on which I have no experience, but there is lots of experi- 
 ence in your shops and you know all about it, or can easily find out. 
 
 242 
 
‘‘That is, I think, the remedy for your present ills. I can only 
 suggest it but I have no knowledge to enable me to fill in detail. 
 
 “ One other word on quite another side issue. Don’t talk about 
 market gardening as a means of making money in one’s spare time ! 
 Market gardening to make money must be well done, and at certain 
 seasons a gardener must up with the sun and late to bed, whether the 
 shops be busy or slack. A small garden as an occupation for a man’s 
 leisure is another thing — nothing can be better — he gets new potatoes, 
 green peas, fresh strawberries, etc., for himself and family, luxuries 
 very different from the things called by the same name in town. His 
 potatoes, cabbages and so on, things he would have to buy anyhow 
 are a fair quid pro quo for his rent, and the dainties which he goes 
 without in town, are a lavish reward for some very pleasant work. 
 
 “ I am as strong a believer as ever I was in the general aims of the 
 Guild, 1 hope the good work at Campden can be developed — and I 
 am very sorry I can’t come over to help to talk it over.” 
 
 The following from the same writer came two days later. 
 
 “The Balance Sheet, &c., turned up this morning, and is certainly 
 bad reading. 
 
 “ One or two points strike me. 
 
 £8,4.36 
 
 •.£2,156 
 • • 3>5h9 
 
 1,490 
 
 7’ 2I 5 
 
 £1,221 
 
 bales 
 
 Purchases 
 
 Wages 
 
 Reduction of stock £9,153 
 7*663 
 
 Gross profit about 
 
 This is not nearly high enough, on this barest cost you are not adding 
 quite 17^- per cent. 17J per cent, on £7,215 is about £1,260. 
 I know that you sold a good deal of stuff cheap last year, I don’t 
 know the details of this or how far the figures realised were below 
 stock figures. This of course has to be allowed for as modifying my 
 1 7^ per cent. 
 
 “ I think this forced sale should be treated separately and not lumped 
 in with the normal sales of the business, as it renders any comparison 
 impossible. You say nothing about now your stock is valued. It 
 should, I think, be the barest cost — no profit of any sort should be 
 divided on goods until they are sold. 
 
 “ I see you have written down your stock to £ 1,330. How has this 
 figure been arrived at ? It is of course in addition to the loss below 
 stock figure incurred in the clearance sale. 
 
 “ Is the whole of this dead loss below cost, or does some of it repre- 
 sent profit divided before it was earned ? 
 
 243 
 
“ As to the future I have sketched an imaginary balance sheet for a 
 bad year on the basis of two shops, one for high priced goods and 
 one for trade goods — I have allowed £4,000 for wages which is a 
 little more than you want. 
 
 
 ART BUSINESS. 
 
 
 Purchases . . 
 Wages 
 Designs, &c. 
 Profit. . 
 
 . . £1,000 
 
 . . 2,000 
 500 
 3,000 
 
 Sales . . 
 
 £6,500 
 
 
 £6,500 
 
 
 £6,500 
 
 
 CHEAP BUSINESS. 
 
 
 Purchases 
 Wages 
 Designs, &c. 
 Profit . . 
 
 . . £2,000 
 
 . . 2,000 
 
 500 
 
 Sales.. 
 
 £4,500 
 
 
 £4>5oo 
 
 
 £4 o°° 
 
 
 PROFIT AND LOSS. 
 
 
 Management 
 Advertisement 
 Depreciation 
 General Expenses 
 Profit.. 
 
 .. £1.500 
 
 500 
 
 500 
 
 5°o 
 
 500 
 
 Gross Profit . . 
 Brought down 
 
 .. ^3. °°° 
 
 50° 
 
 
 ^3.500 
 
 
 /3.500 
 
 Net Profit, £500. 
 
 Of course I don’t give these figures as authoritative or final, but the 
 problem is — how to pay about £4, 000 a year in wages, keep steady employ- 
 ment, produce works of art, and avoid making a loss. 
 
 “As you say, had you been making armour plate or patent medicine 
 the problem would have been different ! 
 
 “ I wish you luck with your meetings, and I am very sorry I can’t be 
 with you. 
 
 “ I return the Proxy duly signed.” 
 
 244 
 
Reply No. io. 
 
 “I cannot say yet how many preference shares I will take. Mean- 
 while, let me point out one flaw in your ‘ inducements.’ You say the 
 interest hitherto paid on the Bank Loan will be paid to the preference 
 shareholders. I imagine the said interest has been paid out of 
 capital and has gone to help increase the reduction that now has to 
 be made in the Shares. If you earn enough to write down things 
 amply and then have something over, well and good, the preference 
 shares will look for a dividend after setting aside to reserve and all 
 that. But not until the earnings are sufficient. Preference shares 
 differ from debentures in that they only partake of profits which 
 would be available for the ordinary shares if they weren’t there. But 
 never mind — If we subscribe more money, it will be to keep the 
 Guild and Campden together. 
 
 “ It seems to me there is one hopeful paragraph in your letter. That 
 is No. 8. 
 
 “ Surely, the success of your removal to Campden can never be 
 complete until you have ceased to be ‘aliens in a distant land.’ You 
 must find some bond, some dovetailing into your surroundings, not 
 only to solve the difficulties of the ebb and flow of employment, but 
 also to give tone to your productions. 
 
 “ In China, where they seem to think in salaries and wages the 
 minimum salary was supposed to be what a man could get from tilling 
 a plot of land with his own hands. All above that was special merit. 
 This seems bed rock, doesn’t it ? 
 
 “ Before I got your letter, I tried to put on paper the other evening 
 what was running through my head. I send you my notes for what 
 they are worth : — 
 
 “The excuse of healthy surroundings and healthy enjoyment of 
 leisure is a good primary reason but is only valid in relation to big 
 towns, and not as between country district and country district. 
 
 “ If one examines the manufactures of England carried on in country 
 districts, one generally finds that their link with their locality is or 
 has been either ease of trading, or association with some other local 
 product or trade. And if we proceed to dot Guilds all over England, 
 should we not at once expect local characteristics in their productions. 
 Would the Gloucestershire products be precisely the same as those 
 from Essex or York ? 
 
 “ Can the Guild survive the obvious handicaps existing in the remote- 
 ness of Campden ? 
 
 “ Is there a way to draw upon local labour supplies for temporary help, 
 or to supplement Guild employment when it is slack by applying 
 surplus energies in local work? Is there any local material — oak, 
 chestnut, clay, leather, stone — that can enter into its productions, or, 
 
 245 
 
are there any local needs it can supply. In the past a “ Campden 
 Chair” would mean a chair used, not made, in Campden, though of 
 course probably also made there. 
 
 “The problem you set about solving when you moved out into the 
 country was how to run an ‘ industrial village.’ Now a man who 
 imports his material from outside, and sells it again outside, having 
 expended on it a certain amount of labour, which he would be able 
 to expend on it anywhere, such a man cannot be said to be more 
 than accidentally or sentimentally a citizen of that villiage. 
 
 “Now the reason that such industries are nearly all at home in 
 London, is that in London, the labour problem is made most easy for 
 them. In such a large pool, it is easy to catch temporary workers, 
 and it is justifiable perhaps to throw them back into so large a pool 
 when done with. 
 
 “ But in the country all is different, and some other reason must be 
 found. In London no one requires an excuse for being there, in the 
 country unless you are of it, you are only a guest or a sojourner.” 
 
 Reply No. i i . 
 
 ‘ Your letter gives me much to think about, and you ask me to assist 
 you further by putting more money into the Guild. 
 
 “ Well — my reply is — your proposition is not a ‘ business proposition,’ 
 and therefore I ought to say no. But when I ask myself ought / to 
 regard it as a ‘ business proposition’ I say no also and therefore will 
 I take my share with the others, perhaps even a little more, and 
 subscribe up to a limit of £ — . 
 
 “I sincerely hope your other shareholders will respond likewise and 
 find you the ^1,000 you need, to pacify your bankers, and to carry 
 on. I suppose if the money is not forthcoming you will have to 
 liquidate. I should look upon this as a very great misfortune, not 
 only for industrial and aesthetic, but also for human and ethical 
 reasons. The Guild has, in my opinion, done a very great work, but 
 its greatest work seems to me to have been that it has set a sort of 
 standard for'craftsmanship and life in industry, which has had a wide 
 influence on the conditions of production in this and other countries. 
 As long as it continues to exist I think this influence for good exists 
 also. That is my reason for being unbusinesslike and continuing to 
 support you. 
 
 “I suggest, however, that if you cannot raise your new capital you try 
 another experiment. Why not call your men together and give them 
 the opportunity of starting at Campden little shops of their own ! 
 The Guild as at present constituted has a jewellers’ shop, a silver- 
 smiths’ shop, an enamellers’ shop, a joiners’ and cabinet makers’ shop 
 
 246 
 
a carvers’ shop, a blacksmiths shop and a machine shop, and also, 
 though I believe you are not at present printing, you have among 
 your Guildsmen some of those who have been trained in the great 
 traditions of the Kelmscott and Essex House presses, and produced 
 some of their best work. Well, here we have eight shops all told, 
 each with their special types of skill and ability. Is it not possible 
 that in each of these shops men might be found capable of running 
 them as private businesses, under their own names but with the 
 general name of ‘The Guild of Handicraft’? It would of course 
 mean little mastership as against ‘ Co-operation ,’ but I don’t think the 
 disadvantages of little mastership in your lines of work are so very 
 great, and there would be immense savings in establishment charges 
 and dead expenses. 
 
 “ It would mean, too, that the separate shops would have to make 
 their own bargains with the liquidator, and possibly you might have 
 to find somebody to stand between them and the landlord in the 
 matter of rent, but that would not be difficult to do. 
 
 “I hope, however, that it will not come to this, because I see no 
 reason to suppose in the present conditions of Industry that a group 
 of little shops will be any more financially successful than a Guild of 
 units working under the Registered Companies Act, as you do know, 
 moreover, the men would be greatly handicapped at starting in the 
 matter of capital. 
 
 “ I still assume that you will succeed in raising your fresh capital, and 
 continue as at present, but in that case I offer you another suggestion. 
 You have tried to ‘ humanise business,’ why not humanise your share- 
 holders ? I think you would find some of them quite amenable. 
 
 “ What I suggest is this : If you cannot pay dividend in cash, why 
 not in kind ? If you have to reduce capital because you are over- 
 stocked owing to ‘having to feed your men in the country’ why not 
 give your shareholders the opportunity of taking some of your stock 
 before you wipe out their shares ? They all presumably believe in 
 your products or they would not take up your shares. 
 
 “ I put my own case. I have had no dividend for four years and now 
 I am having my capital reduced, but what, meantime, have you been 
 doing ? Why, writing down stock by 40 per cent, to meet market 
 necessities and selling many of your beautiful products at less than 
 cost of production ; (witness your sale of last year at Dering Yard) 
 this may quite possibly happen again. Now, I should feel much 
 happier and much more inclined to subscribe fresh capital if I knew 
 that though my shares were reduced by 40 per cent., I were now the 
 owner of a nice guild cabinet, or a silver tea service, or a set of Essex 
 House Press Books, to give as wedding presents, instead of knowing, 
 as I do, that you have drastically pulled your balance sheet round, by 
 selling your stock at ruinous prices to others who are making a good 
 
 247 
 
profit out of it (Messrs. D . . . & Co. for instance) — and writing 
 
 down the rest to saleable prices. This may satisfy your auditors and 
 bankers, but what consolation is that to me ? 
 
 “It is an economic axiom that fresh capital is being perpetually 
 created and perpetually destroyed, is it not ? You, in so far as you 
 are engaged in producing works of permanent ‘individual merit,’ are 
 essentually among the creators of it. When, therefore, you take a 
 turn at destroying, e.g. f writing your shareholders capital down, I as 
 a shareholder say, ‘ give us the chance of humanising us first, by 
 inviting us to take your productions at the full retail value. 
 
 “ My suggestion is economically quite a sound one, because the 
 Guild's productions are based upon a hypothetically fair payment of 
 wages for workmanship of high skill, and if you adopt the strictly 
 business course of reducing the value of the stock upon which your 
 wages and expenses have been paid, beyond its value of cost, to its 
 value at forced sale, your shareholders must be the losers also. 
 
 “My suggestion, you see, though economically sound, is not ‘ strict 
 business’ because Art and Craft, in my opinion, never have been and 
 never can be run on ‘ sitict business’ lines ; they must have some other 
 basis, whether of patronage, or support, or State aid. The failure, so 
 far of the Arts and Crafts movement economically, is because it has 
 not yet succeeded in finding this basis, I’m trying to help you find it. 
 “ I commend my suggestion, therefore, to your Board of Directors to 
 work out, with the Company’s lawyer, and with the co-operation of 
 the other shareholders next year — if you pull through. 
 
 “This brings me to my last point. I want you to pull through, 
 because I want to see your new Manager given a real chance. You 
 appear now to have at the head of your works a man who has the 
 business experience, combined with the necessary character, strength 
 and sympathy. I think you have never had this before. I don’t 
 blame you, but I think you have yourself been, perhaps, too absorbed 
 in the aesthetic and ethical ideas that underlie the work, besides you have 
 had your architecture to attend to. These ideas of yours I hold to be 
 absolutely sound. I don’t wish to see them perish for want of proper 
 business application or of proper business opportunity. Therefore I 
 want to see your new man encouraged, helped along, backed up in 
 every possible way, and that means backed up with money and given 
 more time (he has barely had a year yet) if he is to make for the 
 Guild fresh business openings, bring things round, make your pro- 
 ductions move, get them more known, and adapt the Guild’s business 
 to its country conditions. 
 
 “ Indeed, I don’t think £1,000 is near enough, and I shrewdly 
 suspect that in a few years you will be asking me again for more 
 capital ; well ! I don’t know whether I shall subscribe a third time, 
 
 248 
 
but I may judge you by your results in the future, as I have in the 
 past, and as you know Ihold that these results have been goody 
 
 Reply No. 12. 
 
 “ I am much obliged to you for sending me the expressions of 
 opinion on the position of the Guild of Handicraft. I did not answer 
 the previous appeal because I did not think you wanted answers from 
 those who were not taking up shares, and I must now answer much as 
 No. 1. I understand that the difficulty is caused by the fact that the 
 Guild from its constitution can hardly discharge workmen when trade is 
 slack, and the inference that I draw from this is that the combination of 
 workmen's Co-operation with outside shareholders is bad in principle . I 
 cannot therefore consent to throw good money after bad, and a 
 co-operative movement supported by charity is worthless, however 
 good the object in itself may be. I also think as No. 1 , that it is a 
 pity to combine the two objects, co-operation and artistic work, since 
 the latter, I suppose, needs capital which a co-operative society can- 
 not command, at all events until it has been in existence much longer 
 than the Guild. 
 
 “ I am very sorry that with all sympathy for your objects I cannot 
 give you a more satisfactory answer.'* 
 
 Reply No. 13. 
 
 “ I had to come to the conclusion that other interests needed my 
 spare cash more than the Guild. Sympathy without coin is not worth 
 very much. My own view is that the price of your Guild work is so 
 high that it can only appeal to a very limited market. When you 
 started hardly anyone else was working for this market, now very 
 many firms are doing so. As to remedy I think the suggestions of 
 your correspondent No. 9 about two classes of work seem excellent, 
 and the only alternative I believe is for the men themselves so to 
 reduce the price of their goods, as to appeal to a wider market. Low 
 wages and regular work are better surely than high wages and no 
 regular work. All the taxation returns make it increasingly clear that 
 the number of ‘ rich * people is very small and that the great spending 
 power of the country rests with people of moderate incomes who 
 naturally like a good article such as your people make, but have only 
 a limited sum with which to buy anything. 
 
 Reply No. 14. 
 
 “ It was with very great regret that I learned that it might be 
 necessary to wind up the Guild of Handicraft. From what I have 
 
 249 
 
seen and know of it, I have long felt it to be a piece of real civiliza- 
 tion in industry, combining not merely a corporate interest in the 
 work done, but a corporate life outside work and relations which have 
 seemed to me very charming and fruitful, in matters of amusement 
 and general culture, between the members of the Guild and Mrs. 
 Ashbee and yourself. The Guild in short has been under your 
 guidance a real society, not an aggregation of ‘ hands.’ It is this 
 that I have always admired in it, and I think it a matter of very great 
 regret that this little oasis of human life should be submerged in the 
 unintelligent ocean of competitive industry. 
 
 250 
 
APPENDIX III. 
 
 List of the Authorities with whom the Hon. 
 Correspondent in the N. Glos. area has to correspond 
 either directly or indirectly before any comprehensive 
 scheme of Village Education can be carried through 
 on public money. 
 
 The Board of Education — Primary. 
 
 The Board of Education — Secondary. 
 
 The Science and Art Department. 
 
 The Circulation Department, South Kensington. 
 
 The Gloucester County Council. 
 
 The Higher Education Committee of the Gloucester County Council. 
 The Agricultural Committee of the Gloucester County Council. 
 
 The Gloucester School of Domestic Economy. 
 
 The Trustees of the Campden School of Arts & Crafts. 
 
 The Governors of the Campden Grammar School. 
 
 The Managers of the Church of England School, Campden. 
 
 The Managers of the Roman Catholic School, Campden. 
 
 The Campden Higher Education Committee. 
 
 The Campden Higher Education Sub-Committee for Finance and 
 General Purposes. 
 
 The Campden Higher Education Sub-Committee for Hygiene and 
 Domestic Subjects. 
 
 The four or five Sub-centres in adjoining villages which with the 
 view to further complication the Board of Education is dignifying as 
 separate schools. 
 
 The four or five bodies of Managers of adjoining Village Elementary 
 Schools. 
 
 The Oxford University Extension Delegacy. 
 
 And the above have to be approached in a different manner, through 
 one, two or in some cases as many as six different officials ; forms and 
 registers of different types and often in four duplicates have to be 
 filled in, and practically a third of the small grant (^150) devoted to 
 education has to be employed in administration over and above all the 
 voluntary labour that is freely given. 
 
 251 
 
APPENDIX IV. 
 
 No. i. 
 
 Date, 2nd March, 1907. 
 
 Wood Shop Cost Sheet. 
 
 Order No. 9178. 
 
 Description. Design No. 1178 
 
 Estd, P.C. £\o 
 
 CABINET OF OAK. 
 
 Wanted by Urgent. 
 
 Total Cost. 
 
 Labour 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ‘ Snug the 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 joiner 9 
 
 6 
 
 12 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 12 
 
 
 Materials, etc., as detailed 
 
 
 ■ 
 
 7 
 
 5 
 
 
 
 
 
 7 
 
 19 
 
 
 Shop charges. . 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 19 
 
 "h 
 
 
 
 Total 
 
 9 
 
 19 
 
 6 
 
 Materials & Sundries, 
 
 Wood . . 
 Mouldings 
 Polishing 
 Glass 
 
 Carving . . 
 Turning . . 
 
 Fret Cutting 
 Inlay 
 
 Upholstery 
 Locks, &c. 
 
 Hinges & Handles 
 
 Glue & Glass 
 Paper 
 
 Screws & Nails . 
 
 n 
 
 Completed 
 
 Examined 
 
 Passed 
 
 NICK BOTTOM 
 (. Foreman ). 
 
 Remarks. 
 
 Selling Price £\\ 10 o 
 
 It will be observed in the above that there are two percentages put on the top of Labour 
 
 The first is for Shop or Establishment charges and has to cover all costs over and above Labour 
 Rent, Rates and Taxes of Workshops ; Gas, Water, Fuel ; Depreciation on Plant, Tools, 
 Plant, Tools, &c. 
 
 The second percentage, after production is complete but before the final selling price to the 
 Rent, Rates and Taxes of Distributive Premises in London or elsewhere ; Charges of 
 Telegrams, and Sundry Expenses ; Advertising and Catalogues ; Legal Charges, Auditors’ 
 
 252 
 
No. 2. 
 
 Date , 14 March, 1904. 
 
 Smithy Cost Sheet. Order No. 2650. 
 
 Description. 
 
 
 
 Design 
 
 No. 435 
 
 Materials & Sundries. 
 
 Estd. P.C. 58/- 
 
 1 LARGE >SET OF FIRE IRONS 
 (Iron and Copper). 
 
 Wanted by 
 
 Iron 
 
 Steel . . 
 
 Copper 
 
 Brass 
 
 Nuts 
 
 Bolts 
 
 
 I 
 
 6 
 
 0 
 
 Total Cost. 
 
 Screws 
 
 Castings 
 
 Rivets 
 
 Bushings.. 
 
 Design 
 
 Sundries . . 
 
 
 • 
 
 
 Labour 
 
 Peter Quince j 
 
 2 
 
 5 
 
 9 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 3 
 
 His Boy - - 
 
 
 1 
 
 0 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 2 
 
 9 
 
 
 
 
 2 
 
 6 
 
 9 
 
 Completed , 3rd April, 1904. 
 
 
 Materials, etc., as detailed 
 
 
 
 2 
 
 9 
 
 Examined j NICR - BOTTOM • 
 
 Shop Charges . . 
 
 , 
 
 , 
 
 , , 
 
 2 
 
 9 
 1 2 
 
 6 
 
 3 
 
 Remarks. 
 
 {Foreman). 
 
 
 
 Total 
 
 3 
 
 1 
 
 9 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Selling Price 
 
 
 10 
 
 0 
 
 
 
 
 
 and Material. 
 
 and Material and up to the point of delivery of the article. In this percentage are included — 
 Buildings, Furniture, and Fittings ; Insurance; Formen’s supervision ; Cost of Designs ; Repairs to 
 
 customer is arrived at, covers the following— 
 
 Exhibition; Management Expenses, Salaries to Clerical Staff; Carriage; Postages, Stationery, 
 Fees, and Discounts ; Reserve for Bad Debts ; Travelling Expenses ; Interest on Capital, Profit (if any). 
 
 253 
 
3 - 
 
 Date , 19 th September , 1906. 
 
 No. 
 
 Silversmith’s Shop Cost Sheet. Stock Goods. No. 8234. 
 
 Description. 
 
 Design No. A.C.I. 
 Estd. P.C. £'6 10 
 
 SILVER TEA SET, 4 pieces. 
 Holding Capacity of Tea Pot, 1 Pint. 
 
 Wanted by 
 
 
 
 Total Cost. 
 
 Labour 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Tom Snout- 
 
 2 
 
 1 2 
 
 0 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 2 
 
 12 
 
 ° 
 
 Materials, etc., as detailed 
 
 
 2 
 
 18 
 
 ° 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 10 
 
 0 
 
 Shop charges . . 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 0 
 
 
 
 Total 
 
 6 
 
 1 2 
 
 0 
 
 Selling Price £\o o o 
 
 Materials & Sundries. 
 
 Gold 
 
 
 
 
 Silver 17^ oz. 
 
 Metal 
 
 Stones 
 
 2 
 
 9 
 
 7 
 
 Ivory 
 
 Enamel . . 
 Gilding . . 
 Plating 
 Colouring 
 
 
 5 
 
 0 
 
 Glass, &c. 
 Gas 
 
 Casting . , 
 Polishing 
 Design . . 
 Sundries . . 
 
 
 3 
 
 5 
 
 
 2 
 
 18 
 
 0 
 
 Completed i^rd October , 1906. 
 
 Examined ) 
 & Passed ) 
 
 NICK BOTTOM 
 {Foreman). 
 
 Remarks. 
 
 It will be observed in the above that there are two percentages put on the top of Labour and 
 
 The first is for Shop or Establishment charges and has to cover all costs over and above Labour 
 Rent, Rates and Taxes of Workshops; Gas, Water, Fuel; Depreciation on Plant, Tools, 
 to Plant, lools, &c. 
 
 The second percentage, after production is complete but before the final selling price to the 
 Rent, Rates and Taxes of Distributive Premises in London or elsewhere ; Charges ol 
 Telegrams, and Sundry' Expenses ; Advertising and Catalogues ; Legal Charges, Auditors’ 
 
 254 
 
No. 4. Date , 17 th January , 1907. 
 
 Jewellers’ Shop Cost Sheet. Stock Goods. No. 9071. 
 
 Description. 
 
 Design No. 477. 
 Estd. P.C. ^3 
 
 18-ct. PENDANT, 
 
 Enamelled and set with Peridots and 
 Aquamarines. 
 
 Wanted by 
 
 Total Cost. 
 
 Labour 
 
 Francis Flute 
 
 Robin 
 
 Starveiling 
 
 • (for Enamelling.) 
 
 18 
 
 Materials, etc., as detailed . . 
 
 Shop charges . . 
 
 Total 
 
 19 
 
 7 
 
 7 
 
 1 1 
 
 18 
 
 1 1 
 
 Selling Price £\ 7 6 
 
 Materials & Sundries. 
 
 Gold, 18-ct. 
 
 Silver 
 
 Metal 
 
 
 1 1 
 
 Stones 
 
 Ivory 
 
 Enamel . . 
 Gilding . . 
 Plating 
 Colouring 
 Glass 
 
 
 12 
 
 Gas 
 
 Casting 
 Polishing 
 Design . . 
 Sundries . . 
 
 
 3 
 
 
 1 
 
 7 
 
 Completed z%th February , 1907. 
 
 Examined ) 
 <Sf Passed j 
 
 NICK BOTTOM 
 {Foreman). 
 
 Remarks. 
 
 Material. 
 
 and Material and up to the point of delivery of the Article. In this percentage are included — 
 Buildings, Furniture, and Fittings ; Insurance ; Foremen’s Supervision ; Cost of Designs ; Repairs 
 
 customer is arrived at, covers the following — 
 
 Exhibtion ; Management Expenses, Salaries to Clerical Staff ; Carriage ; Postages, Stationery, 
 Fees, and Discounts ; Reserve for Bad Debts; Travelling Expenses; Interest on Capital, Profit (if any). 
 
 255 
 
APPENDIX V. 
 
 The Guild Roll from 1887 to 1908 inclusive. 
 
 C. V. Adams . . 
 
 C. R. Ashbee . . 
 
 C. W. Atkinson . 
 
 J. Baily . . . 
 
 J. Barlow . 
 
 T. Binning . . 
 
 G. M. Bishop 
 
 C. Bray . . . 
 
 F. Brown . 
 
 A. J. Cameron . 
 J. Chatterton . . 
 
 J. S. Codings 
 W. Curtis . . . 
 
 iX C. H. Daniels 
 
 H. T. Dennis 
 
 C. H. Downer . 
 
 R. Eatley . . 
 
 W. C. Edwards . 
 W. English . . 
 
 J. W. Field . 
 
 W. Flowers . 
 
 A. Gebhardt . . 
 
 W. Hardiman 
 W. T. Hart . . 
 
 G. Hart . . . 
 
 T. E. Hewson 
 W. H. Hill . . 
 
 R. M. Holland . 
 G. E. J. Horwood 
 F. H. Hubbard . 
 
 E. Jackson . . 
 
 T. Jeliffe . . . 
 
 T. R. Jeliffe . . 
 
 C. Kennedy . . 
 
 J. T. Lodder . . 
 
 Cabinet maker . . 
 
 Architect .... 
 Cabinet maker . . 
 
 Silversmith . . 
 
 Cabinet maker . . 
 
 Compositor . . . 
 
 Hon. Guildsman 
 Cabinet maker . 
 Blacksmith . . . 
 
 Metal worker . . 
 
 Silversmith . 
 
 Joiner 
 
 Cabinet maker . . 
 
 Jeweller .... 
 Cabinet maker . 
 Blacksmith . . . 
 
 Pressman 
 
 Silversmith . 
 
 Joiner 
 
 Joiner 
 
 Metal worker . . . 
 
 Jeweller 
 
 Silversmith & Modeller 
 
 Carver 
 
 Silversmith . 
 Silversmith . 
 Compositor . . . . 
 
 Hon. Guildsman 
 Jeweller .... 
 Secretary 
 
 Cabinet maker . . . 
 
 Cabinet maker . . 
 
 Pressman 
 
 Jeweller 
 
 Pressman 
 
 Year of 
 
 
 No. of 
 years 
 
 Election. 
 
 
 Service. 
 
 1888 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 10 
 
 1888 
 
 
 2 I 
 
 1893 
 
 Deceased . 
 
 7 
 
 1899 
 
 
 13 
 
 1894 
 
 Resigned , 
 
 6 
 
 1899 
 
 
 9 
 
 I 906 
 
 
 2 
 
 1899 
 
 
 7 
 
 I9OI 
 
 
 6 
 
 1896 
 
 
 15 
 
 1901 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 1 
 
 1899 
 
 
 3 
 
 I 889 
 
 
 20 
 
 I9OI 
 
 
 7 
 
 1894 
 
 Deceased . 
 
 4 
 
 1898 
 
 
 H 
 
 1903 
 
 
 4 
 
 1904 
 
 
 5 
 
 I900 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 2 
 
 1900 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 3 
 
 1891 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 2 
 
 1902 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 3 
 
 1893 
 
 Deceased . 
 
 16 
 
 1907 
 
 
 6 
 
 1908 
 
 
 6 
 
 1905 
 
 
 3 
 
 1903 
 
 
 4 
 
 1898 
 
 
 10 
 
 I 902 
 
 
 11 
 
 1888 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 2 
 
 1899 
 
 
 3 
 
 1894 
 
 
 15 
 
 1904 
 
 
 3 
 
 1901 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 1 
 
 I9OO 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 5 
 
W. Mark . . . 
 
 J. McQueen . 
 
 A. Miller . . . 
 
 ^ S. Mowlem . . 
 
 I W. J. Osborn 
 
 H. Osborn . . 
 
 H. T. Page . . 
 
 J. Pearson . . 
 
 A. Penny . . . 
 
 H. Phillip . . . 
 
 R. G. Phillips . 
 H. Phillips . . 
 
 ^ C. Plunkett . . 
 
 H. D. Pontin . . 
 
 F. Prout . . . 
 
 j^'J. W. Pyment. . 
 
 r^A. Ramage . • 
 
 ^ R. Read . . . 
 
 J. E. Reid . . . 
 
 R. Ricketts . . 
 
 A. Riddell . . 
 
 C. V. Robinson . 
 A. G. L. Rogers. 
 C. Rome . . 
 
 A. G. Rose . . 
 
 W. Scurr . . . 
 
 W. Stevens 
 T. C. Sutton . . 
 
 W. Thornton . . 
 
 J. Tippett . . . 
 
 E. Toy .... 
 A S. Tuckey. . 
 J. W. Tuckey. . 
 
 E. Viner . . 
 
 W. H. Wall . . 
 
 W. Weale . . . 
 
 J. T. Webster . 
 I/'' W. A. White . . 
 
 y‘ J. Williams . . 
 
 W. H. Wride. . 
 
 G. Yon win 
 
 Enameller .... 
 
 Jeweller 
 
 Carver & Modeller . 
 Pressman 
 
 Cabinet maker . . . 
 
 Turner 
 
 Silversmith . 
 
 Metal worker 
 
 Chaser 
 
 Engraver 
 
 Cabinet maker . . 
 
 Cabinet maker . . . 
 
 Wood polisher & Gilder 
 Cabinet maker . . 
 
 Secretary 
 
 Cabinet maker . . . 
 
 Compositor . . . . 
 
 Cabinet maker . . 
 
 Draughtsman . , . 
 
 Silversmith . . . . 
 
 Jeweller 
 
 Silversmith . . . . 
 
 Hon. Guildsman 
 
 Jeweller 
 
 Cabinet maker . . . 
 
 Jeweller 
 
 Cabinet maker . . . 
 
 Wood polisher . . 
 
 Blacksmith . . . . 
 
 Compositor . 
 
 Silversmith . . 
 
 Salesman 
 
 Salesman 
 
 Jeweller 
 
 Cabinet maker . . . 
 
 Joiner 
 
 Hon. Guildsman 
 Metal worker 
 Metal worker 
 Cabinet maker . 
 
 Cabinet maker . . 
 
 No. of 
 
 Year of years 
 
 Election. Service 
 
 190 [ 
 
 
 8 
 
 1900 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 3 
 
 1904 
 
 
 6 
 
 i 8qg 
 
 Deceased . 
 
 3 
 
 1 892 
 
 
 18 
 
 1902 
 
 
 5 
 
 1901 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 1 
 
 1888 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 8 
 
 1904 
 
 Deceased . 
 
 4 
 
 1 901 
 
 
 2 
 
 1889 
 
 ' Resigned . 
 
 3 
 
 1 889 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 3 
 
 1 898 
 
 
 1 2 
 
 1899 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 4 
 
 1 890 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 3 
 
 1894 
 
 
 16 
 
 1904 
 
 
 3 
 
 1894 
 
 Deceased . 
 
 4 
 
 1890 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 2 
 
 1898 
 
 Deceased . 
 
 3 
 
 1900 
 
 
 5 
 
 1900 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 2 
 
 1889 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 3 
 
 1901 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 2 
 
 1890 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 1 2 
 
 1901 
 
 
 5 
 
 1899 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 3 
 
 1898 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 1 
 
 1894 
 
 
 H 
 
 1899 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 4 
 
 190 1 
 
 
 5 
 
 1899 
 
 
 5 
 
 190 r 
 
 
 3 
 
 1901 
 
 Resigned , 
 
 3 
 
 1905 
 
 
 4 
 
 1906 
 
 
 3 
 
 1 906 
 
 
 2 
 
 1 890 
 
 
 l l 
 
 1888 
 
 Resigned . 
 
 4 
 
 1906 
 
 
 3 
 
 00 
 
 vO 
 
 Deceased . 
 
 3 
 
 257 
 
Others who served their apprenticeship or worked their 
 
 TIME IN THE GUILD SHOPS WITHOUT TAKING UP FULL MEMBERSHIP: 
 
 No. of 
 Year of years 
 entry. Service. 
 
 J. G. Angus . . 
 
 . Clerk 
 
 
 . . . 1902 
 
 3 
 
 Nellie Binning 
 
 Bookbinder . 
 
 
 . . . 1902 
 
 2 
 
 A. Bunten .... 
 
 . Cabinet maker 
 
 
 . . . 1902 
 
 6 
 
 J. Cameron. 
 
 Metal worker . 
 
 
 . . . 1903 
 
 4 
 
 F. Cliff 
 
 
 
 . . . 1899 
 
 5 
 
 D. Collins .... 
 
 . Jeweller . . 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 C. Corbin .... 
 
 . Metal worker . 
 
 
 . . . 1902 
 
 3 
 
 S. Cotton .... 
 
 Cabinet maker 
 
 
 . . . 1896 
 
 8 
 
 W. Curtis .... 
 
 . Cabinet maker 
 
 
 . . . 1903 
 
 4 
 
 F. Dowsett .... 
 
 . Cabinet maker 
 
 
 . . . 1 900 
 
 6 
 
 Lottie Eatley . . . 
 
 . Bookbinder . 
 
 
 . . . 1902 
 
 2 
 
 R. Eatley .... 
 
 . Cabinet maker 
 
 
 . . . 1904 
 
 3 
 
 W. Fenn .... 
 
 Clerk 
 
 
 . . . 1901 
 
 1 
 
 Edgar Green . 
 
 . Bookbinder . 
 
 
 . . . 1902 
 
 2 
 
 L. Hughes .... 
 
 Blacksmith 
 
 
 . . . 1896 
 
 5 
 
 H. Humphries 
 
 . Silversmith 
 
 
 . . 1903 
 
 4 
 
 Stanley Keeley . . 
 
 Metal worker . 
 
 
 . . . 1902 
 
 5 
 
 C. Kelsey .... 
 
 Metal worker . 
 
 
 . . . 1896 
 
 5 
 
 J. Maryon .... 
 
 . Silversmith 
 
 
 . . . 1896 
 
 2 
 
 Mark Merriman . . 
 
 . Enameller . . 
 
 
 . . . 1902 
 
 5 
 
 W. Merriman . 
 
 . Clerk . . . 
 
 
 . . . 1904 
 
 2 
 
 W. Moran .... 
 
 . Jeweller . . 
 
 
 . . . 1904 
 
 4 
 
 W. Palmer .... 
 
 . Pressman . . 
 
 
 . . 1903 
 
 3 
 
 F. Partridge . . . 
 
 . Jeweller . . 
 
 
 . . . 1902 
 
 2 
 
 A. Pilkington . . . 
 
 . Joiner . . . 
 
 
 . . . 1895 
 
 5 
 
 Fred. Pontin . . . 
 
 . Cabinet maker 
 
 
 . . . 1899 
 
 4 
 
 Anne Power . . . 
 
 . Bookbinder . 
 
 
 . . . 1902 
 
 4 
 
 S. Reeve .... 
 
 Silversmith 
 
 
 . . . 1901 
 
 3 
 
 S. Samuels .... 
 
 . Jeweller 
 
 
 . . . 1898 
 
 3 
 
 A. Tracey 
 
 Blacksmith 
 
 
 1902 
 
 3 
 
 F. C. Varley . 
 
 . Enameller . . 
 
 
 . . . 1901 
 
 6 
 
 G. Vickery .... 
 
 Secretary . 
 
 
 . . . 1907 
 
 1 
 
 H. E. L. West . . 
 
 . Metal worker . 
 
 
 . . . 1898 
 
 4 
 
 E. S. Williams . . 
 
 . Accountant 
 
 
 • • • 1903 
 
 3* 
 
 E. Williams . . . 
 
 . Clerk . . . 
 
 
 . . . 1906 
 
 1 
 
 In addition to the above there have been 
 
 em 
 
 iployed some half-dozen 
 
 men or boys from time to time in unskilled labour. 
 
 258 
 
 /g‘, 
 

 1 jf j 
 
 A'— y A 
 
 Printed for the Author by 
 
 Messrs. Grant & Co., Ltd., 
 and 
 
 Published by the Essex House Press, 
 Campden, Glos., and 
 16A, Brook Street, London. 
 
Other works by the same author , of which some 
 are still obtainable by application to the Secretary 
 of the Essex House Press , Campden , Glos. 
 
 The Trinity Hospital in Mile End : an object lesson 
 in National History. 
 
 Chapters in Workshop Reconstruction & Citizenship. 
 The Treatises of Cellini on Metal Work & Sculpture. 
 The Survey of Bromley-by-Bow. 
 
 The Essex House Song Book. 
 
 An Endeavour in the Teachings of John Ruskin and 
 William Morris. 
 
 The Masque of the Edwards. 
 
 American Sheaves and English Seed Corn. 
 
 On the Need for the Establishment of Country Schools 
 of Arts and Crafts. 
 
 Echoes from the City of the Sun. 
 
 The Last Records of a Cotswold Community. 
 
 Socialism and Politics : a Study in the Readjustment 
 of Values. 
 
 A Book of Cottages and Little Houses. 
 
GETTY CENTER LIBRARY 
 
 l i 
 
 3 3125 00952 1606