I. SAVAGENESS VI. THE NATURE OF GOTHIC 197

2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end.

3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving records of great works.

The second of these principles is the only one which directly rises out of the consideration of our immediate subject; but I shall briefly explain the meaning and extent of the first also, reserving the enforcement of the third for another place.¹

1. Never encourage the manufacture of anything not necessary, in the production of which invention has no share.

For instance. Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out the glass into rods; these rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of beads by the human hand, and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail.² Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods or fuse the fragments, have the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty; and every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavouring to put down.³

But glass cups and vessels may become the subjects of

¹ [Ruskin enforced this point in many places-first at Edinburgh (1853), in his Lectures on Architecture and Painting, §§ 46-49, where he suggests the purchase of drawings rather than engravings; then at Manchester (1857), in the lectures published as The Political Economy of Art, and afterwards printed under the title A Joy for Ever, §§ 90, 91, where he says, “never buy a copy of a picture”; and see also Val d’ Arno, § 291.]

² [Ruskin is no doubt describing what he had seen at the glass works of Murano.]

³ [The abolition of the slave-trade, so far as this country was concerned, was enacted in 1807; the abolition of slavery in British colonies, in 1833. The anti-slavery movement then took a further development, being directed towards treaties with other countries regarding the right of search and other measures for the suppression of the trade; as, for instance, in Brazilian waters (1845). It is to such efforts as these that Ruskin is here alluding.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]