Changes must emanate from the public, not from their servant, the producer: for it is they who pay for it, not any elect body. The painter paints for the Royal Academy, but it is the people who buy his pictures. The musician composes an opera - the people support or condemn it. The poet writes, and the people publish his work if he expresses their thoughts - not without. Emerson puts it quaintly, that we love 'those who tell us what we know;' and the main value of art lies in its education of the people, the drawing out in noble form what is already there. Naturally, the upholsterer cannot afford to be independent of the people - he must supply their demand, and give them as little for their money as they will accept. And here is the point - what do the people want and care for in domestic art? for what they insist upon they will assuredly get.

Educate the public that they may recognise what is good, whether in colour, shape, or construction. Educate the workman that he may be equal to the coming demand. Give him an interest in his work. Separate the good art-workman from the human machine who spends his life in making only legs, or only scrolls, or some other fractional part of a design which he never sees in its entirety and therefore cannot contribute intelligently to. But no one can educate him but the customer. He cannot subsist on an ideal.

We know more, we notice more, than we did. 'Let us guard ourselves from old errors in a new direction by examining the principles of beauty in what we admire - every one for himself. This, and this only, is the secret of originality.

To care for beauty, to nurse our precious freedom to think for ourselves and to do as we like in art-matters, to avoid the fatal sheep-walk which the timid and ignorant so soon beat out, the stereotyped house of the stereotyped art-decorator, to give our individual stamp to our own little propriete in the common heritage of the Beautiful; this is what we have to do, this is the way to create a new, a national school of art in England, and the way to carry into domestic life pleasant and refining influences.

Having now laid down my premises (not, I hope, too sweepingly), that rooms and their furniture should be beautiful; that beauty is confined to no people and to no period; that blue and green are not the only colours in the rainbow; and that the present 'aesthetic' craze unvitalised by new blood is poor and parrot-like; I will proceed to more practical hints on the art of decoration.