es and colleges, and to
a splendid development of public buildings, the Sargents of Socialism
will paint famous people instead of millionaires' wives, poetry and
popular romantic literature will revive. For my own part I have no
doubt where the balance of advantage lies.

It seems reasonable to look to the literary and artistic people
themselves for a little guidance in this matter. Well, we had in the
nineteenth century an absolute revolt of artists against
Individualism. The proportion of open and declared Socialists among
the great writers, artists, playwrights, critics, of the Victorian
period was out of all proportion to the number of Socialists in the
general population. Wilde in his _Soul of Man under Socialism_, Ruskin
in many volumes of imperishable prose, Morris in all his later life,
have witnessed to the unending protest of the artistic spirit against
the rule of gain. Some of these writers are not, perhaps, to be
regarded as orthodox Socialists in the modern sense, but their disgust
with and contempt for Individualist competition is entirely in the
vein of our teaching.

Even this Individualistic country of ours, after the shameful shock of
the Great Exhibition of 1851, decided that it could no longer leave
art to private enterprise, and organized that systematic government
Art Teaching that has, in spite of its many defects, revolutionized
the aesthetic quality of this country. And so far as research and
invention go, one may very reasonably appeal to such an authority on
the other side, as the late Mr. Beit, of Wernher Beit & Co. The
outcome of his experience as an individualist financier was to
convince him that the only way to raise the standard of technical
science in England, and therewith of economic enterprise, was by the
endowment of public teaching, and the huge "London Charlottenburg"
rises--out of his conviction. Even Messrs. Rockefeller and Carnegie
admit the failure of Individualism in this matter by pouring money
into public universities and public libraries. All these heads of the
commercial process confess by such acts just exactly what this
objection of the inexperienced denies, that is to say the power of the
State to develop art, invention and knowledge; the necessity that this
duty should be done if not by, then at any rate through, the State.

Socialism may very seriously change the direction of intellectual and
aesthetic endeavour; that one admits. But there is no reason whatever