MANUAL WORK. 405 



The flight of genius which has characterised 

 the workers at the outset of modern industry 

 has been missing in our professional men of 

 science. And they will not recover it as long as 

 they remain strangers to the world, amidst their 

 dusty bookshelves ; as long as they are not 

 workers themselves, amidst other workers, at 

 the blaze of the iron furnace, at the machine 

 in the factory, at the turning-lathe in the en- 

 gineering workshop ; sailors amidst sailors on 

 the sea, and fishers in the fishing-boat, wood- 

 cutters in the forest, tillers of the soil in the 

 field. 



Our teachers in art Ruskin and his school 

 have repeatedly told us of late that we must not 

 expect a revival of art as long as handicraft 

 remains what it is ; they have shown how Greek 

 and mediaeval art were daughters of handicraft, 

 how one was feeding the other. The same is 

 true with regard to handicraft and science ; 

 their separation is the decay of both. As to the 

 grand inspirations which unhappily have been so 

 much neglected in most of the recent discussions 

 about art and which are missing in science as 



them, including the socialists, doing, but studying chiefly the 

 books previously written and the systems, instead of studying 

 the facts of the economical life of the nations, and the thousands 

 of attempts at giving to agriculture and industry new forms of 

 organisation and new methods, which are now made every- 

 where in Europe and America ? 



