Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
Nowhere else in the world, except among the moribund fresco-painters of the Greek monasteries, has a formula of art persisted from the seventh or eighth century to the present day; and in Morocco the formula is not the mechanical expression of a petrified theology but the setting of the life of a people who have gone on wearing the same clothes, observing the same customs, believing in the same fetiches, and using the same saddles, ploughs, looms, and dye-stuffs as in the days when the foundations of the first mosque of El Kairouiyin were laid.
We did, however, deprive ourselves by this loan of an argument to prove the defective neutrality of the United States. In 1916 we succeeded in getting hold of some five millions in Treasury notes without formal loan negotiations. Another economic question which occupied my attention was connected with the export of German dye-stuffs to the United States.
I think that they must begin by acknowledging that the ancient art, the art of unconscious intelligence, as one should call it, which began without a date, at least so long ago as those strange and masterly scratchings on mammoth-bones and the like found but the other day in the drift that this art of unconscious intelligence is all but dead; that what little of it is left lingers among half-civilised nations, and is growing coarser, feebler, less intelligent year by year; nay, it is mostly at the mercy of some commercial accident, such as the arrival of a few shiploads of European dye-stuffs or a few dozen orders from European merchants: this they must recognise, and must hope to see in time its place filled by a new art of conscious intelligence, the birth of wiser, simpler, freer ways of life than the world leads now, than the world has ever led.
Thus a number of the perfumes of flowers, and many of the dye-stuffs which a century ago were extracted from vegetables, and were then supposed to be only obtainable in that way, are now readily manufactured. In time it seems likely that important articles of food, for which we now depend upon the seeds of plants, may be directly built up from the mineral kingdom.
But the central idea of this first promise is that it must be God's hand which sprinkles from an evil conscience. Forgiveness is a divine prerogative. He only can, and He will, cleanse from all filthiness. His pardon is universal. The most ingrained sins cannot be too black to melt away from the soul. The dye-stuffs of sin are very strong, but there is one solvent which they cannot resist.
A good deal of popular prejudice has arisen against certain aniline dyes on account of their inferiority to many of the old dye-stuffs in respect to their fastness, but in recent years the manufacture of many which were under this disadvantage of looseness of dye, has entirely ceased, whilst others have been introduced which are quite as fast, and sometimes even faster than the natural dyes.
They are chiefly sugar, pepper, tin, nutmegs, mace, sago, tapioca, rice, buffalo hides and horns, rattans, gutta, india rubber, gambier, gums, coffee, dye-stuffs, and tobacco, but the island itself, though its soil looks rich from its redness, only produces pepper and gambier. In the latter year, tonnage to the amount of three millions of tons arrived in its harbor.
To every such rug must go three pounds of cotton or two pounds of woolen rags, costing for cotton thirty and for woolen fifty cents. To the cotton rugs must be added the possible cost of dye-stuffs, which, again, might cost twenty cents, making cost of material in either cotton or woolen rugs from sixty to sixty-four cents.
Quite early in the war dye-stuffs ran short, and there was no means of replenishing the stock in Britain, nor even in America, these products having formed the staple of a colossal manufacture, with an enormous financial turnover, in Germany. Let us look at the history of these dyes. The first aniline dye was discovered quite by accident, in 1856, by the late Professor W. H. Perkin.
Now, in order to dissolve this greasy matter, a considerable amount of soap must be employed; and in the course of purification of the fabric, not merely what may be characterized as "dirt" is removed, but also short fibers, and various dye-stuffs with which the fabric has been dyed, many of which are partially soluble in alkaline water; moreover, it invariably happens that some dye does not combine with the fiber and mordant, thus becoming fixed, but merely incrusts the fiber; hence this portion is washed off when the retaining film of grease is removed from the fiber.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking