fulness of life. It is also, as a general statement, true
that there are no amusements in East London, which contains two and a
half millions of people, has no municipality, and is the biggest,
ugliest, and meanest city in the whole world. Yet it is equally true
that there are in it institutes for education and science, art, and
literature, mutual improvement societies, clubs at which there are
evenings for singing, dancing, and private theatricals, and rowing,
swimming, and cricket clubs. It is again, as a general rule, true that
the lower classes are ignorant of science, yet there are everywhere
scattered among the working men single cases of earnest devotion to
science. And it is painfully true that they do not seem to feel the
ugliness of their own streets and houses; yet no one who has been
among the holiday folks in the country on a Bank Holiday or a fine
Sunday in the summer can deny their profound appreciation of field and
forest, flowers and green leaves, sunshine and shade. It is, lastly,
perfectly true that their lives, compared with those of the more
cultivated classes, do seem horribly dull, monotonous, and poor. Yet
the dulness is more apparent than real: ugly houses and mean streets
do not necessarily imply mean and ugly lives. Their days may be
enlivened in a thousand ways which to the outsider are invisible.
Among these are some which directly or indirectly make for the
appreciation of Art.

It seems safe, however, to advance one proposition. There is a class
in and below which it is impossible that there can exist a feeling for
Art of ally kind, or, indeed, for religion, for virtue, for knowledge
of any kind, or for anything beyond the necessity of providing for the
next day's food and shelter. Those miserable women who work from early
morning to late night, condemned to a slavery worse than any we have
abolished; those hungry men who besiege the dock-gates for a day's
work, and have nothing in the whole world but a pair of hands; that
vast class which is separated from starvation by a single day--what
thought, interest, or care can they have for anything in the world but
the procuring of food? When the physical condition of English men and
women is worse, as Professor Huxley has declared it to be, than the
condition of naked savages in the Southern Seas, how can we look for
the virtues and the aspirations which belong essentially to the level
of comparative ease? Until we have mastered the problem of