Chairman to address a few words to you before distributing the prizes,
to give you instruction about Art or Science. One who was educated, as I
was, under the old system, can hardly see without a pang the improvement
that has been made in education since his time. In a public school, in
my day, you learned nothing of Science, Art, or Music. Having received
nothing, I have nothing to give. Fortunately, the only thing of
importance to be said this evening can be said without technical
knowledge of any kind. The School of Art needs better accommodation. The
financial details will be explained to you by those who are more
conversant with them than I am. I will only say that parsimony in this
matter on the part of the government or other public bodies will, in my
humble opinion, be unwise. I am not for a lavish expenditure of public
money, even on education. It would be a misfortune if parental duty were
to be cast on the State, and parents were to be allowed to forget that
they are bound to provide their children with education as well as with
bread. But it seems that at this moment the soundest and even the most
strictly commercial policy would counsel liberality in providing for the
National Schools of Art and Science. England is labouring under
commercial depression. Of the works in the manufacturing districts, many
are running half time, and some, I fear, are likely, if things do not
mend, to stop. When I was there the other day gloom was on all faces.
Some people seem to think that the bad time will pass away of itself,
and that a good time will come again like a new moon. It is a
comfortable but a doubtful doctrine. And suppose the good time does not
come again, the outlook for those masses and their employers is dark. A
friend of mine, who is a manufacturer, said to me the other day that he
had been seeing the ruins of a feudal castle, and that the sight set him
thinking if factories should ever, like feudal castles, fall into decay,
what their ruins would be like? They would be unromantic no doubt, even
by moonlight. But much worse than the ruins of buildings would be the
ruin among the people. Imagine these swarming multitudes, or any large
proportion of them, left by the failure of employment without bread. It
would be something like a chronic Indian famine. The wealth of England
is unparalleled, unapproached in commercial history. Add Carthage to
Tyre, Venice to Carthage, Amsterdam to Venice, you will not make
anything like a London. Ten thousand pounds paid for a pair of china
vases. A Roman noble under the Empire might have rivalled this, but the
wealth of the Roman nobles was not the fruit of industry, it was the
plunder of the world. You can hardly imagine how those who come fresh
from a new country like Canada, or parts of the United States--a land
just redeemed from the wilderness, with all its untrimmed roughness, its
fields half tilled and full of stumps, its snake fences, and the charred
pines which stand up gaunt monuments of forest fires--are impressed, I
might almost say ravished, by the sight of the lovely garden which
unlimited wealth expended on a limited space has made of England. This
country, too, has an immense capital invested in the funds and
securities of foreign nations, and in this way draws tribute from the
world, though, unhappily, we are being made sensible of the fact that
money lent to a foreign government is lent to a debtor on whom you
cannot distrain. But the sources of this fabulous prosperity, are they
inexhaustible? In part, we may hope they are. A maritime position,
admirably adapted for trading with both hemispheres, a race of first-
rate seamen, masses of skilled labour, vast accumulations of machinery
and capital--these are advantages not easily lost. And there is still in
England good store of coal and iron. Not so stable, however, is the
advantage given to England by the effects of the Napoleonic war, which
for the time crushed all manufactures and mercantile marines but hers.
Now, the continental nations are developing manufactures and mercantile
marines of their own. You go round asking them to alter their tariffs,
so as to enable you to recover their markets, and almost all of them
refuse; about the only door you have really succeeded in getting opened
to you is that of France, and this was opened, not by the nation, but by
an autocrat, who had diplomatic purposes of his own. The _Times_,
indeed, in a noteworthy article the other day, undertook to prove that a
great manufacturing and trading nation might lose its customers without
being much the worse for it, but this seems too good to be true; I fancy
Yorkshire and Lancashire would say so. Is it not that very margin of
profit of which _The Times_ speaks so lightly, which, being
accumulated, has created the wealth of England? Your manufacturers are
certainly under the impression that they want markets, and the loss of
the great American market seems to them a special matter of concern. It
is doubtful whether that market would be restored to them even by an
alteration of the tariff. The coal in the great American coal fields is
much nearer the surface, and consequently more cheaply worked, than the
coal in England; iron is as plentiful, and it is near the coal; labour,
which has been much dearer there, is now falling to the English level.
Tariff or no tariff, America will probably keep her own market for the
heavier and coarser goods. But there is still a kind of goods, in the
production of which the old country will long have a great advantage. I
mean the lighter, finer, and more elegant goods, the products of
cultivated taste and of trained skill in design--that very kind of
goods, in short, the character of which these Schools of Art are
specially intended to improve. Industry and invention the new world has
in as ample a measure as the old; invention in still ampler measure, for
the Americans are a nation of inventors; but cultivated taste and its
special products will long be the appanage of old countries. It will be
long before anything of that kind will pass current in the new world
without the old world stamp. Adapt your industry in some degree to
changed requirements; acquire those finer faculties which the Schools of
Design aim at cultivating, but which, in the lucrative production of the
coarser goods, have hitherto been comparatively neglected, and you may
recover a great American market; it is doubtful whether you will in any
other way. Therefore, I repeat, to stint the Art and Science Schools
would seem bad policy. I may add that it would be specially bad policy
here in Oxford, where, under the auspices of a University which is now
extending its care to Art as well as Science, it would seem that the
finer industries, such as design applied to furniture, decoration of all
kinds, carving, painted glass, bookbinding, ought in time to do
particularly well. If you wish to prosper, cultivate your speciality;
the rule holds good for cities as well as for men.
There are some, perhaps, who dislike to think of Art in connection with
anything like manufacture. Let us, then, call it design, and keep the
name of art for the higher pursuit. Your Instructor presides, I believe,
with success, and without finding his duties clash, over a school, the
main object of which is the improvement of manufactures, and another
school dedicated to the higher objects of aesthetic cultivation. The name
manufacture reminds you of machines, and you may dislike machines and
think there is something offensive to artists in their products. Well, a
machine does not produce, or pretend to produce, poetry or sculpture; it
pretends to clothe thousands of people who would otherwise go naked. It
is itself often a miracle of human intellect. It works unrestingly that
humanity may have a chance to rest. If it sometimes supersedes higher
work, it far more often, by relieving man of the lowest work, sets him
free for the higher. Those heaps of stones broken by the hammer of a
poor wretch who bends over his dull task through the weary day by the
roadside, scantily clad, in sharp frost perhaps or chilling showers, are
they more lovely to a painter's eye than if they had been broken,
without so much human labour and suffering, by a steam stone-crusher? No
one doubts the superior interest belonging to any work however
imperfect, of individual mind; but if we were not to use a pair of tongs
that did not bear the impress of individual mind, millionaires might
have tongs, but the rest of us would put on coals with our fingers.
After all, what is a machine but a perfect tool? The Tyrian loom was a
machine, though it was worked by hand and not by steam; and if the
Tyrian had known the power loom, depend upon it he would have used it.
Without machines, the members of this School might all be grinding their
corn with hand mills, instead of learning Art. Common humanity must use
manufactured articles; even uncommon humanity will find it difficult to
avoid using them, unless it has the courage of its convictions to the
same extent as George Fox, the Quaker, who encased himself in an entire
suit of home-made leather, bearing the impress of his individual mind;
and defied a mechanical and degenerate world. The only practical
question is whether the manufactures shall be good or bad, well-designed
or ill; South Kensington answers, that if training can do it, they shall
be good and well designed.