Well, there are some rich men among us whom we oddly enough call manufacturers, by which we mean capitalists who pay other men to organise manufacturers; these gentlemen, many of whom buy pictures and profess to care about art, burn a deal of coal:  there is an Act in existence which was passed to prevent them sometimes and in some places from pouring a dense cloud of smoke over the world, and, to my thinking, a very lame and partial Act it is:  but nothing hinders these lovers of art from being a law to themselves, and making it a point of honour with them to minimise the smoke nuisance as far as their own works are concerned; and if they don’t do so, when mere money, and even a very little of that, is what it will cost them, I say that their love of art is a mere pretence:  how can you care about the image of a landscape when you show by your deeds that you don’t care for the landscape itself? or what right have you to shut yourself up with beautiful form and colour when you make it impossible for other people to have any share in these things?

Well, and as to the smoke Act itself:  I don’t know what heed you pay to it in Birmingham, {7} but I have seen myself what heed is paid to it in other places; Bradford for instance:  though close by them at Saltaire they have an example which I should have thought might have shamed them; for the huge chimney there which serves the acres of weaving and spinning sheds of Sir Titus Salt and his brothers is as guiltless of smoke as an ordinary kitchen chimney.  Or Manchester:  a gentleman of that city told me that the smoke Act was a mere dead letter there:  well, they buy pictures in Manchester and profess to wish to further the arts:  but you see it must be idle pretence as far as their rich people are concerned:  they only want to talk about it, and have themselves talked of.

I don’t know what you are doing about this matter here; but you must forgive my saying, that unless you are beginning to think of some way of dealing with it, you are not beginning yet to pave your way to success in the arts.

Well, I have spoken of a huge nuisance, which is a type of the worst nuisances of what an ill-tempered man might be excused for calling the Century of Nuisances, rather than the Century of Commerce.  I will now leave it to the consciences of the rich and influential among us, and speak of a minor nuisance which it is in the power of every one of us to abate, and which, small as it is, is so vexatious, that if I can prevail on a score of you to take heed to it by what I am saying, I shall think my evening’s work a good one.  Sandwich-papers I mean—­of course you laugh:  but come now, don’t you, civilised as you are in Birmingham, leave them all about the Lickey hills and your public gardens and the like?  If you don’t I really scarcely know with what words to praise you.  When we Londoners go to enjoy ourselves at Hampton Court, for instance, we take special good care to let everybody know that we