As for the difficulty of starting the classes, I think that the assistance of Board School masters, foremen of works, Sunday schools, the political clubs, and debating societies should be invited; and that besides small scholarships, substantial prizes of musical and mathematical instruments, books, artists’ materials, and so forth, should be offered, with the glory of public exhibition and public performances.  After the first year there should be nothing exhibited in the Palace except work done in the classes, and no performances of music or of plays should be given but by the students themselves.

There has been going on in Philadelphia for the last two years an experiment, conducted by Mr. Charles Leland, whose sagacious and active mind is as pleased to be engaged upon things practical as upon the construction of humorous poems.  He has founded, and now conducts personally, an academy for the teaching of the minor arts; he gets shop girls, work girls, factory girls, boys and young men of all classes together, and teaches them how to make things, pretty things, artistic things.  ‘Nothing,’ he writes to me, ’can describe the joy which fills a poor girl’s mind when she finds that she, too, possesses and can exercise a real accomplishment.’  He takes them as ignorant, perhaps—­but I have no means of comparing—­as the London factory girl, the girl of freedom, the girl with the fringe—­and he shows them how to do crewel-work, fretwork, brass work; how to carve in wood; how to design; how to draw—­he maintains that it is possible to teach nearly every one to draw; how to make and ornament leather work, boxes, rolls, and all kinds of pretty things in leather.  What has been done in Philadelphia amounts, in fact, to this:  that one man who loves his brother man is bringing purpose, brightness, and hope into thousands of lives previously made dismal by hard and monotonous work; he has put new and higher thoughts into their heads; he has introduced the discipline of methodical training; he has awakened in them the sense of beauty.  Such a man is nothing less than a benefactor to humanity.  Let us follow his example in the Palace of the People.

I venture, further, to express my strong conviction that the success of the Palace will depend entirely upon its being governed, within limits at first, but these limits constantly broadening, by the people themselves.  If they think the Palace is a trap to catch them, and make them sober, good, religious and temperate, there will be an end.  In the first place, therefore, there must be a real element of the working man upon the council; there must be real working men on every sub-committee or branch; the students must be wholly recruited from the working classes; and gradually the council must be elected by the people who use the Palace.  Fortunately, there would be no difficulty at the outset in introducing this element, because the great factories and breweries in the neighbourhood might be asked each to elect one or more representatives to sit upon the council of the new University.  It ‘goes without saying’ that the police work, the maintenance of order, the out-kicking of offenders, must be also entirely managed by a voluntary corps of efficient working men.  Rows there will undoubtedly be, since we are all of us, even the working man, human; but there need be no scandals.