d Ruskin, the squalor
which moved Matthew Arnold to the fiercest scorn in all his writings,
Morris's appreciation arose from his craftsman's knowledge and respect
for supreme craftsmanship. The great ships building upon the Clyde were
for him "the greatest achievement of [Page: 106] humanity since the days
of the cathedral-builders," nay, for him actually surpassing these,
since calling forth an even more complex combination and "co-operation
of all the material arts and sciences" into a mighty and organic whole;
and correspondingly of all their respective workers also, this being for
him of the very essence of his social ideal.

For these reasons he insisted, to my then surprise that the social
reorganisation he then so ardently hoped for "was coming faster upon the
Clyde than upon the Thames": he explained as for him the one main reason
for his then discouragement as to the progress of London that there East
and West, North and South, are not only too remote each from the other,
but in their occupations all much too specialised--there to finance,
there to manufactures, or here to leisure, and so on; while on the Clyde
industrial organisation and social progress could not but develop
together, through the very nature of the essential and working unity of
the ship.

Since Morris's day, a local art movement, of which he knew little, has
risen to eminence, a foreign critic would say to pre-eminence, in this
country at least. Since Ruskin's savage response to a Glasgow invitation
to lecture--"first burn your city, and cleanse your river,"--a new
generation of architects and hygienists have not a little transformed
the one, and vigorous measures have been taken towards the purification
of the other. That the city and university pre-eminently associated
with the invention of the steam-engine, and consequently with the advent
of the industrial revolution throughout the world, should, a century
later, have produced a scarcely less pre-eminent leader of applied
science towards the command of electricity is thus no isolated
coincidence. And as political economy, which is ever the theory
corresponding to our phase of industrial practice, and there some of
its foremost pioneers, and later its classical exponent, Adam Smith
himself, so once more there are signs at least of a corresponding wave
of theoretic progress. Students of primitive civilisation and industry
have now long familiarised us with their reinterpretation of what wa