society is industrial slavery, far-reaching and intimate, supreme over every man's life, dominating every action of it from the greatest to the least: no man and no set of men 15 can do anything that does not tend towards the support of this slavery unless 3 they act as conscious rebels against it. Men living under such conditions cannot produce social art or architecture (with all that grasp of the decorative cycle of the arts which that word means), or even desire to do so; they have lost all understanding of what it is; the mass of the people have nothing to do with Art architectural except so far as they are compelled to produce the sham of it mechanically as a trade finish to wares, so as to give them a higher marketable value. Space fails us here to contrast this condition of things with that of the epochs that produced Art, or to show the consequences of the difference. Suffice it to say once more that, except for the very few works produced by men of exceptional genius, which works the general public does not relish or understand in the least, Art is for the most part dormant.
In this brief review of the various phases of modern life,—its family relations, morality, religion, politics, and art,—the reader who has not yet studied socialism may see nothing but pessimism.
For until recently amongst cultivated 16 people, enjoying whatever advantages may be derived from civilisation, there has been an almost universal belief, not yet much broken into, that modern or bourgeois’ civilisation is the final form of human society. Were this the case we should be pessimists indeed, but happily we know that civilisation is only a stage in the development of the human race, just as barbarism was, or the savagery of the progressive nations. Civilisation must of necessity develop into some other form of society, the tendencies of which we can see, but not the details; for it is now becoming clear that this new state of society can only be reached through the great economic, moral, and political change which we call Socialism; and the essential foundation of this is the raising of the working classes to a point that gives them a control over their own labour and its product.