During 1858 Ruskin continued to lecture at various places on subjects connected with his Manchester addresses—­the relation of art to manufacture, and especially the dependence of all great architectural design upon sculpture or painting of organic form.  The first of the series was given at the opening of the Architectural Museum at South Kensington, January 13th, 1858, entitled “The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations;” in which he showed that naturalism, as opposed to meaningless pattern-making, was always a sign of life.  For example, the strength of the Greek, Florentine and Venetian art arose out of the search for truth, not, as it is often supposed, out of striving after an ideal of beauty; and as soon as nature was superseded by recipe, the greatest schools hastened to their fall.  From which he concluded that modern design should always be founded on natural form, rather than upon the traditional patterns of the east or of the mediaevals.

On February 16th he spoke on “The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art and Policy,” at Tunbridge Wells; a subject similar to that of his address to the St. Martin’s School of the year before, but amplified into a plea for the use of wrought-iron ornament, as in the new Oxford Museum, then building, and on April 25th he again addressed St. Martin’s School.

The Oxford Museum was an experiment in the true Gothic revival.  The architects, Sir Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward, had allowed their workmen to design parts of the detail, such as capitals and spandrils, quite in the spirit of Ruskin’s teaching, and the work was accordingly of deep interest to him.  So far back as April, 1856, he had given an address to the men employed at the Museum, whom he met, on Dr. Acland’s invitation, at the Workmen’s Reading Rooms.  He said that his object was not to give some labouring men the chance of becoming masters of other labouring men, and to help the few at the expense of the many, but to lead them to those sources of pleasure, and power over their own minds and hands, that more educated people possess.  He did not sympathize with the socialism that had been creeping into vogue since 1848.  He thought existing social arrangements good, and he agreed with his friends, the Carlyles, who had found that it was only the incapable who could not get work.  But it was the fault of the wealthy and educated that working people were not better trained; it was not the working-men’s fault, at bottom.  The modern architect used his workman as a mere tool; while the Gothic spirit set him free as an original designer, to gain—­not more wages and higher social rank, but pleasure and instruction, the true happiness that lies in good work well done.