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artistic, even where he is allowed to make them useful! Two main causes are at work here. In the first place, the worker is kept working so ruthlessly and at such very high pressure that he cannot possibly take any real pleasure in what he is doing. Moreover, his mind and body are so exhausted as a result of the long day's toil in the interests of the profit-makers that he is scarcely in a suitable frame of mind, after his work is over, to turn his attention to any occupation that requires concentrated effort of any kind. When one considers the long hours, the arduous nature of the work, and the evil conditions under which the manual proletarians have to live, one is struck dumb with wonder; not at the fact that so many working men seek a narcotic or a stimulant in the form of alcohol or a cheap music-hall (as our dear sentimentalists complain), but that so many of them have the astonishing endurance to go through with the day's work and still to take some interest in matters not immediately connected with the daily round. The marvel is, not that some of the workers are a trifle unrefined in their pursuits, but that the whole lot have not been brutalised beyond all hope of redemption. It merely serves to show how impossible it is to eradicate men's higher impulses, and the feeling for Art goes with the rest, lake away long hours, take away slums—take away, in fact, everything we've got, and put its exact opposite in its place, and amongst the things which will come again to the surface of the people's soul will be the old, irrepressible yearning after Art.
If these forces were not sufficient to benumb the workers' artistic instincts, Capitalism would at least make sure that those instincts should not be satisfied. If the flame still burns in the poisonous air, Capitalism pours cold water on it. If every single workman in the land were cultured, refined, an artist to his fingertips, he would be quite unable to put artistry into his work. In the first place, a very great deal of our manufacture is nowadays machinafacture, and a machine can scarcely put much soul, emotion, individuality (call it what you like) into its work. In the second place, where the craftsman actually handles the whole thing, he dare not attempt to strike out a line for himself.
Take a concrete example. Suppose one of those unfortunate men who will be compelled to assist in the building of the Eatanswill-on-the-Quicksands Free Library were to say to himself as he contemplated the growing monument: "Heavens! What an eyesore!" and suppose he were to conclude that he would put
