the handicraftsman to a slave of the machine.  Factories had poisoned the English sky with their smoke, and blackened English soil and polluted English rivers with their refuse.  The railroad had spoiled Venice and vulgarised Switzerland.  He would like to tear up all the railroads in Wales and most of those in England, and pull down the city of New York.  He could not live in America two months—­a country without castles.  Modern architecture, modern dress, modern manufactures, modern civilisation, were all utterly hideous.  Worst of all was the effect on the workman, condemned by competitive commercialism to turn out cheap goods, condemned by division of labour to spend his life in making the eighteenth part of a pin.  Work without art, said Ruskin, is brutalising.  To take pleasure in his work, said Morris, is the workman’s best inducement to labour and his truest reward.  In the Middle Ages every artisan was an artist; the art of the Middle Ages was popular art.  Now that the designer and the handicraftsman are separate persons, the work of the former is unreal, and of the latter merely mechanical.

This point of view is eloquently stated in that chapter on “The Nature of Gothic” in “The Stones of Venice,” which made so deep an impression on Morris when he was in residence at Oxford.[43] “It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves.  Their universal outcry against wealth and against nobility is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine or the sting of mortified pride.  These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day.  It is not that men are ill-fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.  It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. . . .  We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name.  It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men—­divided into mere segments of men—­broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. . . .  And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all, in very deed, for this—­that we manufacture everything there except men. . . .  And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only . . . by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman.” [44]