ot merely giving affluence and leisure to others, but giving
simplicity and utility to ourselves?

XIII.

And, even apart from this, does not all true aestheticism tend to
diminish labour while increasing enjoyment, because it makes the
already existing more sufficient, because it furthers the joys of the
spirit, which multiply by sharing, as distinguished from the pleasures
of vanity and greediness, which only diminish?

XIV.

You may at first feel inclined to pooh-pooh the notion that mere love
of beauty can help to bring about a better distribution of the world's
riches; and reasonably object that we cannot feed people on images and
impressions which multiply by sharing; they live on bread, and not on
the _idea_ of bread.

But has it ever struck you that, after all, the amount of material
bread--even if we extend the word to everything which is consumed for
bodily necessity and comfort--which any individual can consume is
really very small; and that the bad distribution, the shocking waste
of this material bread arises from being, so to speak, used
symbolically, used as spiritual bread, as representing those _ideas_
for which men hunger: superiority over other folk, power of having
dependants, social position, ownership, and privilege of all kinds?
For what are the bulk of worldly possessions to their owners: houses,
parks, plate, jewels, superfluous expenditure of all kinds [and armies
and navies when we come to national wastefulness]--what are all these
ill-distributed riches save _ideas_, ideas futile and ungenerous, food
for the soul, but food upon which the soul grows sick and corrupteth?

Would it not be worth while to reorganise this diet of ideas? To
reorganise that part of us which is independent of bodily sustenance
and health, which lives on spiritual commodities--the part of us
including ambition, ideal, sympathy, and all that I have called
_ideas_? Would it not be worth while to find such ideas as all people
can live upon without diminishing each other's share, instead of the
_ideas_, the imaginative satisfactions which each must refuse to his
neighbour, and about which, therefore, all of us are bound to fight
like hungry animals? Thus to reform our notions of what is valuable
and distinguished would bring about an economic reformation; or, if
other forces were needed, would make the benefits of such economic
reformation completer, its hardships easier to bear; and, altering our
views of loss