to rest, reflection, instruction, and a little music?  The cheap excursions, the school feasts, the concerts given for the people, the increased brightness of religious services, the Bank holidays, the Saturday half-holiday, all point to the gradual recognition of the great natural law that men and women, as well as boys and girls, must have play.  At the present moment we have just arrived at the stage of acknowledging this law; the next step will be that of respecting it, and preparing to obey it, just now we are willing and anxious that all should play; and it grieves us to see that in their leisure hours the people do not play because they do not know how.

Compare, for instance, the young workman with the young gentleman—­the public schoolman, one of the kind who makes his life as ‘all round’ as he can, and learns and practises whatever his hand findeth to do.  Or, if you please, compare him with one of the better sort of young City clerks; or, again, compare him with one of the lads who belong to the classes now held in the building of the old Polytechnic; or with the lads who are found every evening at the classes of the Birkbeck.  First of all, the young workman cannot play any game at all, neither cricket, football, tennis, racquets, fives, or any of the other games which the young fellows in the class above him love so passionately:  there are, in fact, no places for him where these games can be played; for though the boys may play cricket in Victoria Park, I do not understand that the carpenters, shoemakers, or painters have got clubs and play there too.  There is no gymnasium for them, and so they never learn the use of their limbs; they cannot row, though they have a splendid river to row upon; they cannot fence, box, wrestle, play single-stick, or shoot with the rifle; they do not, as a rule, join the Volunteer corps; they do not run, leap, or practise athletics of any kind; they cannot swim; they cannot sing in parts, unless, which is naturally rare, they belong to a church choir; they cannot play any kind of instrument—­to be sure the public schoolboy is generally grovelling in the same shameful ignorance of music; they cannot dance; in the whole of this vast city there is not a single place where a couple, so minded, can go for an evening’s dancing, unless they are prepared to journey as far as North Woolwich.  Not one.  Ought it not to be felt and resented as an intolerable grievance that grandmotherly legislation actually forbids the people to dance?  That the working men themselves do not seem to feel and resent it is really a mournful thing.  Then, they cannot paint, draw, model, or carve.  They cannot act, and seemingly do not care greatly about seeing others act; and, as already stated, they never read books.  Think what it must be to be shut out entirely from the world of history, philosophy, poetry, fiction, essays, and travels!  Yet our working classes are thus practically excluded.  Partly they have done this for themselves, because they have never felt