thousands, of lives with the knowledge and mastery of a craft; it would save from degradation and from slavery thousands of women; it would restrain thousands of men from the beery slums of drink and crime.  Above all—­perhaps this is the main consideration—­the judicious employment of ten thousand pounds a year would be presently worth many millions a year to London from the skilled labour it would cultivate and the many arts it would develop and foster.

It is a cruel thing—­a most cruel thing—­to destroy wantonly anything that is venerable with age and associated with the memories of the past.  It was a horrible thing to destroy that old Hospital.  But it is gone.  The house of Shams and Shadows in Regent’s Park has got nothing whatever to do with it.  Its revenues did not make the old Hospital; that was made up by its ancient church; by the old buildings clustered round the church; by the old customs of the Precinct, with its Courts, temporal and spiritual, its offices and its prison; by its burial-grounds, with its Bedesmen and Bedeswomen, and by the rough sailor population which dwelt in its narrow lanes and courts.  How could that place be allowed to suffer destruction?  But when the old thing is gone we must cast about for the best uses of anything which once belonged to it.  And of all the uses to which the revenues of the old Hospital might be put, the present seems the most unfit and the least worthy.

Again, if Queen Matilda in these days wished to do a good work, what would she found?  There are many purposes for which benevolent persons bequeath and grant money.  They are not the old purposes.  They all mean, nowadays, the advancement and bettering of the people.  A great lady spends thousands in founding a market; a man with much money presents a free library to his native town; collections are made for hospitals; everything is for the bettering of the people.  We have not yet advanced to the stage of bettering he rich people; but that will come very shortly.  In fact, the condition of the rich is already exciting the gravest apprehensions among their poorer brethren.  We can trace, easily enough, the progress and growth of charity.  It begins at home, with anxiety for one’s own soul first, and the souls of one’s children next.  Charities give way to doles; doles are succeeded by almshouses; these again by charity schools.  The present generation has begun to understand that the truest charity consists in throwing open the doors to honest effort, and in helping those who help themselves.  Else what is the meaning of technical schools?  What else mean the classes at the People’s Palace, the Polytechnic, the Evening Recreation Schools, and the City of London Guilds Institute?