One thing more.  I am firmly convinced that the only institutions in any country which endure are those which take a firm hold of the popular mind and are supported by the people themselves.  In order to make the College of Art permanent, it must belong absolutely to the people.  This can only be effected by the gradual retirement of the wealthy class, who will start it, from the management, and the substitution of actual working men in their place—­working men, I mean, who have themselves been through some course of study in the College, and have, perhaps, become teachers.  And as working men will certainly do nothing without pay—­in London, whatever may be the case elsewhere, their strongest feeling is that their only possessions are their time and their hands—­we shall have to provide that the teachers of the schools, the directors of the college, and the clerks in the secretariat, shall never be paid at a higher rate than the current rate of wage for manual work.  The people themselves will in the end supply council, executive officers, and teaching staff.  The time is ripe; we are ready to begin the work; I do not fear for a moment that the working man will not, if we begin with prudence, presently respond, and, through him, the boys and girls.

We must, however, have a museum, although on this subject I cannot dwell.  I should like to take the Bethnal Green institution entirely out of South Kensington hands; they have had it for fourteen years, and you have heard what they have made of it.  I think they should hand it over, if not to our new College of Art, then to a local committee, who would at least try to show what an educational museum should be.  Our educational museum will be a branch of the College of Art; it will be in all respects the exact opposite of the Bethnal Green Museum; it will have everything which is there wanting; it will have a library and reading-room; it will have lecturers and teachers, it will have class-rooms; the exhibits will be changed continually; there will be an organ and concerts; there will be a theatre, there will be in it every appliance which will teach our pupils the exquisite joy, the true and real delight, of expressing noble thought in beautiful and precious work.

THE AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE

‘And do your workmen,’ asked a London visitor of a Lancashire mill-owner—­’do your workmen really live in those hovels?’

‘Certainly not,’ replied the master.  ’They only sleep there.  They live in my mill.’

This was forty years ago.  Neither question nor answer would now be possible.  For the hovels are improved into cottages; the factory hands no longer live only in the mill; and the opinion, which was then held by all employers of labour, as a kind of Fortieth Article, that it is wicked for poor people to expect or hope for anything but regular work and sufficient food, has undergone considerable modification.