The recreation of the people, in fact, has proved a stumbling-block rather than an attraction.  It is a new idea suddenly presented to people who have never considered the subject of recreation at all, save in connection with skittles, so to speak.  Now it seems hardly necessary to erect a splendid palace for the better convenience of the skittle alley.  The objections, in fact, to supporting the scheme on the ground of its recreative aims show a mixture of prejudice and ignorance which ought to astonish us were we not daily, in every business transaction and in every talk with friend or stranger, encountering, and very likely revealing, the most wonderful prejudice and ignorance.  One should never be surprised at finding great black patches in every mind.

The black patch which concerns us, in the minds of those who have been asked to support the People’s Palace, is the subject of recreation.  ’There are enough music-halls.  What have the working classes to do with recreation?  If we give anything for the people it will be for their improvement, not for their amusement.’  To these three objections all the rest may be reduced.  Each objection points to a prejudice of very ancient standing, or else to a deep-seated ignorance of the whole subject.

To deal with the first.  It is assumed that recreation means amusement, idle and purposeless, if not skittles with beer and tobacco, then the music-hall with beer and tobacco, the comic man bawling a topical song and executing the famous clog-dance.  If one points out that it is not amusement that is meant, but recreation, which is explained to mean a very different thing, while a truer conception of what recreation really means may be seized, then there remains a rooted disbelief as to the power of the working man to rise above his beer and skittles.  It is a disbelief not at all based upon familiarity with the manners and customs of the working man, because the ordinary well-to-do citizen, however much he may have read of manners and customs in other countries, is, as a rule, perfectly ignorant and perfectly incurious as to those of his fellow-countrymen; nor is it based upon the belief that the working man is imperfect in mind or body; but on an assurance that the working man will never lift himself to the level of the higher form of recreation, simply because the ordinary man knows himself and his own practice.  He desires to be amused, and according to his manner of life he finds amusement in tobacco, reading, cards, music, or the theatre.

Consider the well-to-do man in pursuit of recreation.  He has a club; he goes to his club every day; perhaps he gets whist there; very likely he belongs to one of the modern sepulchral places where the members do not know each other and every man glares at his neighbour.  There is a billiard-table in all clubs as well as a card-room.  Apart from cards and billiards the clubs recognise no form of recreation whatever.  There are not in any club that I know,