GRAMOPHONES—AND WHY NOT?

for the worker, its chief results have mostly been increased
possibility of profit-making for manufacturers, and the
replacement of Duality by quantity as the means of success-
ful trade. Simultaneously there has been accomplished the
degradation of the worker from the level of an intelligent,
craftsman to that of a living machine. Just how this
process works may be illustrated by the following slightly
adapted extract from the preface to my * Medkevnl
Sinhalese Art.':—

"Not merely is the workman through division of labour no
longer able to make any whole thing, not only is he confined t*>
making small parts ot: things, but it is impossible for him to im-
prove his position or to win reward for excellence in the Graft
itself. Under guild conditions it was possible and usual for the
apprentice to rise through all grades of knowledge and experience
to the position of a master-craftsman. But take any such trade-as
•weaving* under modern conditions by power-loom. The operator
has no longer to design or weave in and out the threads with his
own fingers or to throw the shuttle with his own hand. He is
employed, in reality, «o't as a weaver, but as the tender of -a
machine...That craft is for him destroyed as a means of culture
and the community has lost oce more man's intelligence, for it is
obviously futile to attempt to build up by evening classes and free
libraries what the whole of a man's work is for ever breaking down.
Ib is no longer possible for culture and refinement to come to the
•craftsman through his work ; they must be won. If won at all, in
spite of his work, he must seek them in a brief hour snatched
from rest and sleep, ajt ttfe expense of life itself... There can be BO
quality of leisure in his work. Jn short, commercial production
absolutely forbids a union df art with labour."

In the words of Buskin, " Industry without art is
Brutality." Yet it shcmld not be thought that the recogni-
tion of these fads involves a wholesale attack upon every
form of mechanism, or an impossible desire to revert
absolutely to mediaeval conditions. Mechanism has come
to stay, and has its due purpose to serve as a hewer of wo.od
and drawer of water. But it is for man to see that his

* I have here substituted * -weaving '-for the original Carpet-
making7 as DO carpets are made on power-looms in |ndia at present
and the problem as it concerns weaving is actually before \is,
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