ecause, before long, all the art departments
ought to be conducted by ex-students who have become in their turn
teachers, they should be paid, but not on the West-end scale, from
fees--so that the schools may support themselves. Let us not _give_
more than is necessary; for every class and every course there should
be some kind of fee, though a liberal system of small scholarships
should encourage the students, and there should be the power of
remitting fees in certain cases. As for the difficulty of starting the
classes, I think that the assistance of Board School masters, foremen
of works, Sunday schools, the political clubs, and debating societies
should be invited; and that besides small scholarships, substantial
prizes of musical and mathematical instruments, books, artists'
materials, and so forth, should be offered, with the glory of public
exhibition and public performances. After the first year there should
be nothing exhibited in the Palace except work done in the classes,
and no performances of music or of plays should be given but by the
students themselves.

There has been going on in Philadelphia for the last two years an
experiment, conducted by Mr. Charles Leland, whose sagacious and
active mind is as pleased to be engaged upon things practical as upon
the construction of humorous poems. He has founded, and now conducts
personally, an academy for the teaching of the minor arts; he gets
shop girls, work girls, factory girls, boys and young men of all
classes together, and teaches them how to make things, pretty things,
artistic things. 'Nothing,' he writes to me, 'can describe the joy
which fills a poor girl's mind when she finds that she, too, possesses
and can exercise a real accomplishment.' He takes them as ignorant,
perhaps--but I have no means of comparing--as the London factory girl,
the girl of freedom, the girl with the fringe--and he shows them how
to do crewel-work, fretwork, brass work; how to carve in wood; how to
design; how to draw--he maintains that it is possible to teach nearly
every one to draw; how to make and ornament leather work, boxes,
rolls, and all kinds of pretty things in leather. What has been done
in Philadelphia amounts, in fact, to this: that one man who loves his
brother man is bringing purpose, brightness, and hope into thousands
of lives previously made dismal by hard and monotonous work; he has
put new and higher thoughts into their heads; he has introduced the
discipl