have had something to eat:  so that the park just outside the gates (and a beautiful place it is) looks as if it had been snowing dirty paper.  I really think you might promise me one and all who are here present to have done with this sluttish habit, which is the type of many another in its way, just as the smoke nuisance is.  I mean such things as scrawling one’s name on monuments, tearing down tree boughs, and the like.

I suppose ’tis early days in the revival of the arts to express one’s disgust at the daily increasing hideousness of the posters with which all our towns are daubed.  Still we ought to be disgusted at such horrors, and I think make up our minds never to buy any of the articles so advertised.  I can’t believe they can be worth much if they need all that shouting to sell them.

Again, I must ask what do you do with the trees on a site that is going to be built over? do you try to save them, to adapt your houses at all to them? do you understand what treasures they are in a town or a suburb? or what a relief they will be to the hideous dog-holes which (forgive me!) you are probably going to build in their places?  I ask this anxiously, and with grief in my soul, for in London and its suburbs we always {8} begin by clearing a site till it is as bare as the pavement:  I really think that almost anybody would have been shocked, if I could have shown him some of the trees that have been wantonly murdered in the suburb in which I live (Hammersmith to wit), amongst them some of those magnificent cedars, for which we along the river used to be famous once.

But here again see how helpless those are who care about art or nature amidst the hurry of the Century of Commerce.

Pray do not forget, that any one who cuts down a tree wantonly or carelessly, especially in a great town or its suburbs, need make no pretence of caring about art.

What else can we do to help to educate ourselves and others in the path of art, to be on the road to attaining an art made by the people and for the people as A joy to the maker and the user?

Why, having got to understand something of what art was, having got to look upon its ancient monuments as friends that can tell us something of times bygone, and whose faces we do not wish to alter, even though they be worn by time and grief:  having got to spend money and trouble upon matters of decency, great and little; having made it clear that we really do care about nature even in the suburbs of a big town—­having got so far, we shall begin to think of the houses in which we live.

For I must tell you that unless you are resolved to have good and rational architecture, it is, once again, useless your thinking about art at all.