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Galleporto Bavicarius Directory 12
Page 05
The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a group and not a coterie. They were engaged in working and enjoying, in looking out for artistic promise, in welcoming and praising any performance of a kind that Rossetti recognised as "stunning." They were sure of their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its mystic initials, was all a gigantic game; and they held together because they were revolutionary in this, that they wished to slay, as one stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and sentimental art of the day. They did not effect anything like a revolution, of course. It was but a ripple on the flowing stream, and they diverged soon enough, most of them, into definite tracks of their own. The strength of the movement lay in the fact that they hungered and thirsted after art, clamouring for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says, as an ordinary man clamours for beer. But their aim was not to mystify or to enlarge their own consequence, but to convert the unbeliever, and to produce fine things.
Various opinions have been held as to whether we have any trace of a religious belief. Theoretically speaking, they had some sort of a religion, though doubtless very vague and indistinct; for we know of no nation as far advanced as they were destitute of it.<37> It has been pointed out, that the bones of some animals, as the horse, were very rare, and their absence explained as the result of superstitious reasons. It has also been conjectured that some of the perforated bones and teeth of animals found in various deposits were amulets worn for religious purposes; and some have gone so far as to infer, that the ornamentations on some of these so-called amulets represent the sun, and that, consequently, sun-worship prevailed among the Cave-men. While these various conjectures are, of course, possible, it is equally certain they are all "mere guess-work."
This, they say, could be done without reducing the present production of electricity for ordinary purposes, since only 19 per cent. of the effective capacity of the 2,000,000 horse power producible by the electrical plants of Germany is actually used. The supply of phosphoric fertilizers is also endangered through the stoppage of imports of phosphate rock (nearly 1,000,000 tons a year) as well as the material from which to make sulphuric acid; also, through the reduction in the production of the iron furnaces of the country, from the slag of which over 2,000,000 tons of so-called Thomas phosphate flour was produced, will involve a big reduction in the make of that valuable fertilizer. Thus, there is a lack of horses, of fertilizers, and of the guiding hand of man. This last, however, can be partly supplied by utilizing for farm work such of the prisoners of war as come from the farm. As Germany now holds considerably more than 600,000 prisoners, it can draw many farm laborers from among them. Prisoners are already used in large numbers in recovering moorland for agricultural purposes.
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