VILLAGE INDUSTRIES 299 



with quaint designs in the brightest of colours, even their common 

 agricultural and domestic implements proclaim their origin at the 

 first glance by their shape ; and it is this local colouring which 

 makes them valued. So it is with the toys, the glass goods, the 

 wicker work of foreign making. However, cottage industry has 

 also its artistic side — which, perhaps, considering what the market 

 in its present condition will take, our would-be promoters of cottage 

 industries have considered a little overmuch. The market for such 

 articles is necessarily limited. It does not want to be glutted. 

 And in it attention wants to be paid equally to the taste of the public 

 — which will not buy what it does not like — and the already noted 

 cachet of originality and speciality. We can no more force the 

 demand of the public in cottage-made goods than — as we have found 

 out to our cost — we can in the matter of factory-made commodities, 

 such as we have in the past — as consular reports have warned us — 

 far too much manufactured according to our own ideas and con- 

 venience, in the place of studying the taste and likings of our 

 intended customers. These are not goods that people must have 

 as they must have furniture, clothes and food. It is the character of 

 the article, as something special, with a peculiar stamp of artistic 

 merit upon it, that will make them buy it. Our various exhibitions 

 of cottage-made goods have, as observed, given proof of much 

 originality and artistic skill in the makers. But, on the whole, it 

 is to be questioned if we have paid quite sufficient attention to the 

 tastes of the market. 



It was, in part, to teach their people to make small industry 

 articles of the best type — artistic ones, with their own attractive 

 cachet, and useful ones, according to the best patterns, manufactured 

 with the greatest economy and the most complete skill- — that 

 Continental Governments — more particularly those of Germany, 

 Austria and Hungary — established, at public expense, so many 

 technical educational institutions, with exhibitions, permanent or 

 periodical, to supplement their teaching, as a means of instructing 

 the young folk in the prosecution of those industries, or as a help to 

 that industry and, through it, to the general welfare. The work of 

 teaching is even carried into schools, more particularly of the 

 elementary grade. In Hungary some little time ago there were no 

 fewer than 666 elementary schools — 40 per cent, of the total number 

 of schools in existence — in which, as a matter of obligation for the 

 teachers, cottage industries were taught. We have, of course — 

 though in much smaller number — also our specifically technical 

 educational establishments, started and carried on, as a rule, by 



