Well, as every one must needs have his panacea for the ills of society, let me inform you of mine.  To humanise the multitude two things are necessary—­two things of the simplest kind conceivable.  In the first place, you must effect an entire change of economic conditions:  a preliminary step of which every tyro will recognise the easiness; then you must bring to bear on the new order of things the constant influence of music.  Does not the prescription recommend itself?  It is jesting in earnest.  For, work as you will, there is no chance of a new and better world until the old be utterly destroyed.  Destroy, sweep away, prepare the ground; then shall music the holy, music the civiliser, breathe over the renewed earth, and with Orphean magic raise in perfected beauty the towers of the City of Man.

Hours yet before the fireworks begin.  Never mind; here by good luck we find seats where we can watch the throng passing and repassing.  It is a great review of the People.  On the whole how respectable they are, how sober, how deadly dull!  See how worn-out the poor girls are becoming, how they gape, what listless eyes most of them have!  The stoop in the shoulders so universal among them merely means over-toil in the workroom.  Not one in a thousand shows the elements of taste in dress; vulgarity and worse glares in all but every costume.  Observe the middle-aged women; it would be small surprise that their good looks had vanished, but whence comes it they are animal, repulsive, absolutely vicious in ugliness?  Mark the men in their turn:  four in every six have visages so deformed by ill-health that they excite disgust; their hair is cut down to within half an inch of the scalp; their legs are twisted out of shape by evil conditions of life from birth upwards.  Whenever a youth and a girl come along arm-in-arm, how flagrantly shows the man’s coarseness!  They are pretty, so many of these girls, delicate of feature, graceful did but their slavery allow them natural development; and the heart sinks as one sees them side by side with the men who are to be their husbands.

One of the livelier groups is surging hitherwards; here we have frolic, here we have humour.  The young man who leads them has been going about all day with the lining of his hat turned down over his forehead; for the thousandth time those girls are screaming with laughter at the sight of him.  Ha, ha!  He has slipped and fallen upon the floor, and makes an obstruction; his companions treat him like a horse that is ‘down’ in the street.  ’Look out for his ‘eels!’ cries one; and another, ’Sit on his ‘ed!’ If this doesn’t come to an end we shall die of laughter.  Lot one of the funniest of the party is wearing a gigantic cardboard nose and flame-coloured whiskers.  There, the stumbler is on his feet again. ’’Ere he comes up smilin’!’ cries his friend of the cardboard nose, and we shake our diaphragms with mirth.  One of the party is an unusually tall man.  ‘When are you comin’ down to have a look at us?’ cries a pert lass as she skips by him.