alone is in my mind.  Even concerning East London exception may be taken to anything I may advance.  That is because it is impossible to make any general proposition whatever of humanity considered in the mass except the elementary ones, such as that all must eat and sleep, to which objection may not be raised.  Thus, I know that it is true, and I am prepared to maintain the assertion, that the lower classes in London care nothing about Art, and know nothing about Art, and have only an elementary appreciation of things beautiful.  It is equally true, on the other hand, that there are everywhere some whose hearts are yearning and whose hands are stretched out in prayer for greater beauty and fulness of life.  It is also, as a general statement, true that there are no amusements in East London, which contains two and a half millions of people, has no municipality, and is the biggest, ugliest, and meanest city in the whole world.  Yet it is equally true that there are in it institutes for education and science, art, and literature, mutual improvement societies, clubs at which there are evenings for singing, dancing, and private theatricals, and rowing, swimming, and cricket clubs.  It is again, as a general rule, true that the lower classes are ignorant of science, yet there are everywhere scattered among the working men single cases of earnest devotion to science.  And it is painfully true that they do not seem to feel the ugliness of their own streets and houses; yet no one who has been among the holiday folks in the country on a Bank Holiday or a fine Sunday in the summer can deny their profound appreciation of field and forest, flowers and green leaves, sunshine and shade.  It is, lastly, perfectly true that their lives, compared with those of the more cultivated classes, do seem horribly dull, monotonous, and poor.  Yet the dulness is more apparent than real:  ugly houses and mean streets do not necessarily imply mean and ugly lives.  Their days may be enlivened in a thousand ways which to the outsider are invisible.  Among these are some which directly or indirectly make for the appreciation of Art.

It seems safe, however, to advance one proposition.  There is a class in and below which it is impossible that there can exist a feeling for Art of ally kind, or, indeed, for religion, for virtue, for knowledge of any kind, or for anything beyond the necessity of providing for the next day’s food and shelter.  Those miserable women who work from early morning to late night, condemned to a slavery worse than any we have abolished; those hungry men who besiege the dock-gates for a day’s work, and have nothing in the whole world but a pair of hands; that vast class which is separated from starvation by a single day—­what thought, interest, or care can they have for anything in the world but the procuring of food?  When the physical condition of English men and women is worse, as Professor Huxley has declared it to be, than the condition of naked savages in the