At any rate let us count our gains, and set them against less hopeful signs of the times.  In England, then—­and as far as I know, in England only—­painters of pictures have grown, I believe, more numerous, and certainly more conscientious in their work, and in some cases—­and this more especially in England—­have developed and expressed a sense of beauty which the world has not seen for the last three hundred years.  This is certainly a very great gain, which is not easy to over-estimate, both for those who make the pictures and those who use them.

Furthermore, in England, and in England only, there has been a great improvement in architecture and the arts that attend it—­arts which it was the special province of the afore-mentioned schools to revive and foster.  This, also, is a considerable gain to the users of the works so made, but I fear a gain less important to most of those concerned in making them.

Against these gains we must, I am very sorry to say, set the fact not easy to be accounted for, that the rest of the civilised world (so called) seems to have done little more than stand still in these matters; and that among ourselves these improvements have concerned comparatively few people, the mass of our population not being in the least touched by them; so that the great bulk of our architecture—­the art which most depends on the taste of the people at large—­grows worse and worse every day.  I must speak also of another piece of discouragement before I go further.  I daresay many of you will remember how emphatically those who first had to do with the movement of which the foundation of our art-schools was a part, called the attention of our pattern-designers to the beautiful works of the East.  This was surely most well judged of them, for they bade us look at an art at once beautiful, orderly, living in our own day, and above all, popular.  Now, it is a grievous result of the sickness of civilisation that this art is fast disappearing before the advance of western conquest and commerce—­fast, and every day faster.  While we are met here in Birmingham to further the spread of education in art, Englishmen in India are, in their short-sightedness, actively destroying the very sources of that education--jewellery, metal-work, pottery, calico-printing, brocade-weaving, carpet-making—­all the famous and historical arts of the great peninsula have been for long treated as matters of no importance, to be thrust aside for the advantage of any paltry scrap of so-called commerce; and matters are now speedily coming to an end there.  I daresay some of you saw the presents which the native Princes gave to the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his progress through India.  I did myself, I will not say with great disappointment, for I guessed what they would be like, but with great grief, since there was scarce here and there a piece of goods among these costly gifts, things given as great treasures, which faintly upheld the ancient fame of the cradle of the