The failure of Bethnal Green should teach us what to avoid.  Let us therefore walk round the halls and galleries of this museum.  In the central hall there is placed, each object with a ticket containing a brief description of it, a really noble collection of cabinets, carved and painted; with these are rare and costly vases, of English, Russian, Danish, and German workmanship; there are a few statuettes, some paintings on china, things in glazed earthenware, and glass cases containing Syrian and Albanian necklaces and jewellery.  In the lower side galleries there is, first, a collection of food products, showing specimens of wheat, rice, starch, salt, and so forth, with models of vegetables and fruit executed in wax; and next, a collection of woollen stuff and fabrics of all kinds, with feathers, stags’ heads, antlers, and so forth.  In the upper galleries there is a collection of paintings and engravings.  Here and there are suspended tablets which are inscribed with bits of information, chiefly statistical.  On my last visit to the place I could not observe that anyone was studying these tablets.  This is, roughly speaking, all that the Bethnal Green Museum contains.  The directors of this institution, opened with so much promise, which was going to educate the people and endow them with a sense of Art and a love of beauty, think they have done all they promised when they show a collection of cabinets and vases, a few bottles containing rice and wheat, a few turnips in wax, a few cases with pretty fabrics, and collection of pictures.  There is no music; there is no sculpture; none of the small arts are represented at all; there is not the slightest attempt made to educate anybody.  If you want any other information or help besides that given by the tablets you will not get it, because there is nobody to give it.  A policeman mounts guard over the cases, a woman sells the publications of the South Kensington Department, and you can rend on a board the number of visitors for every day in the year.  But there is no one to go round with you and talk about the things on exhibition.  There are no lectures nor any classes, there are no handbooks to teach the history of the Fine Arts and to illustrate the collection in the museum.  There is not, incredible to say, even a catalogue. There is no catalogue.  Imagine an exhibition without even an official guide to its contents.  Here, says the Department, is the Bethnal Green Museum with its doors wide open:  let the people walk in and inspect the contents.

So, if we invited the people to inspect a collection of cuneiform inscriptions, we might just as well expect them to carry away a knowledge of Assyrian history; or by exhibiting an electrical machine we might as well expect them to understand the appliances of electricity.  It is not enough, in fact, to exhibit pictures:  they must be explained.  It is with paintings and drawings as with everything else, those who come to see them having no knowledge carry none away with