The People’s Palace offers recreation to all who wish to fit themselves for its practice and enjoyment.  But it is recreation of a kind which demands skill, patience, discipline, drill, and obedience to law.  Those who master any one of the Arts, the practice of which constitutes true recreation, have left once and for ever the ranks of disorder:  they belong, by virtue of their aptitude and their education—­say, by virtue of their Election—­to the army of Law and Order.  They will not, we may be sure, be recruited from those whom long years of labour and want of cultivation have tendered stiff of finger, slow of ear and of eye, impenetrable of brain.  We must get them from the boys and girls.  We must be content if the elders learn to take delight in the hand-work which they cannot execute, the decorative work which they can never hope wholly to understand, the music and singing in which they themselves will never take a part.

But they will by no means be left out.  They will have the library, the writing and reading rooms, the conversation and smoking rooms, with those games of skill which are loved by all men.  There will be entertainments, concerts, and performances for them.  And for those who desire to learn there will be classes, lectures, and lecturers.  At the same time, I do not, I confess, anticipate a rush of young working men to share in these joys and privileges.  This part of the Palace will grow and develop by degrees, because it is through the boys and girls that the real work and usefulness of the Palace will be effected, and not by means of the men.  Of course, there will be from the outset a small proportion capable of rightly using the place.  For all these reasons, it seems as if we may be very well contented that the recreation part of the scheme has been for the moment kept in the background.

II.  Let us turn to the educational side of the scheme.

When a lad has passed the standards—­very likely a bright, clever little chap, who had passed the sixth and even the seventh standard with credit—­it becomes necessary for him immediately to earn the greater part of his own living.  It is not in the power of his father, who lives from week to week, or even from day to day, to apprentice his boys and put them to a trade.  They must earn their living at once.  What are they to do?

At the very age when these boys have reached the point when the intellect, already partly trained and the hand, not yet trained at all, should begin to work together, they are faced by the terrible fact—­how terrible to them they little know—­that they can be taught no trade.  They must go out into the world with a pair of unskilled hands, and nothing more.  Consider.  A country lad learns every day something new; he learns continually by daily practice how to use his hands and his strength, by the time he is eighteen he has become a very highly skilled agriculturist; he knows and can do a great