taste of the artist will clash with that of the crowd, and
since the former has no authority to back him he will have to
compromise. The compromise, however, consists in cheap imitation of
foreign models, for in foreign countries art-industry will exist, and
no legislation can prevent its products from finding their way (in
reproductions or actual examples) into Germany and being admired
there. Our half or wholly imitative products are turned out as cheaply
as possible, in substitute-materials, and are made as well or as ill
as the relics of our craftsmanship permit, or as our existing
machinery for the purpose is capable of. Cheapness and ease of
manufacture are the principles aimed at, for even with narrow means no
one will want to do without certain things; fashions still prevail,
and will have to be satisfied with things that do not last, but can be
constantly changed.

How far will a new system of education tend to simplify the needs of
men and women and to purify their taste? Probably very little, for
good models will be lacking, poverty is not fastidious, and the taste
of the populace is the sovereign arbiter. But on this taste it depends
whether vulgar ornaments and gewgaws, frivolities and bazaar-horrors,
are to satisfy the desires of the soul.

Objects of earlier art and industry have been alienated through need
of money or destroyed by negligence. Here and there one may find an
old cup or an engraving, as we do to-day in plundered territories, but
these things are disconnected specimens; all they can do is
occasionally to interest an artist. Whoever wants to procure some
object or to get something done which has not been standardized in the
common range of approved requirements must gain it by a tedious course
of pinching and saving. Personal possessions in the way of books,
musical instruments, works of art, as well as travel outside the
prescribed routes are rarities; a tree of one's own, a horse of one's
own are legendary things.

Thus luxury in its better aspect has gone to ruin quicker than in the
bad. All outlay devoted to culture, to beauty, to invigoration has
dried up; all that survives is what stimulates, what depraves and
befouls; frivolities, substitutes and swindles. What we have arrived
at is not the four-square simplicity of the peasant-homestead, but a
ramshackle city suburb. To some of us it is not easy, and to many it
is not agreeable to picture to themselves the aspect of a thoroughly
p