sible that the East-End Palace Schools will be crammed with
eager learners. The Palace is in the very heart and centre of East
London, with its two millions, mostly working men; trams, trains, and
omnibuses make it accessible from every part of this vast city--from
Bromley, Bow and Stratford, from Poplar, Stepney and Ratcliff, from
Bethnal Green and Spitalfields. Yet but two or three years, and there
will be 20,000 boys and more flocking to those gates which shut out
the Earthly Hell of ignorance, dependence, and poverty, and open the
doors to the Earthly Paradise of skilled hands and drilled eye, of
plenty and the dignity of manhood. Why, if it were only to stop these
early marriages--if only for the sake of the poor child-mother and the
unborn children doomed, if they see the light, to life-long
misery--one would shower upon the Palace all the money that is asked
to complete it. Think--with every stone that is laid in its place,
with every hour of work that each mason bestows upon its walls, there
is another couple rescued, one more lad made into a man, one more girl
suffered to grow into a woman before she becomes a mother, one more
humble household furnished with the means of a livelihood, one more
unborn family rescued from the curse of hopeless poverty.

The remaining portions of the scheme, with its provision for women as
well as men, its entertainments, its University extension lectures,
reading-rooms, and schools of Art in all its branches, can only be
fully realized when the first generation of these boys has passed
through the technical schools, and they have learned to look upon the
Palace as their own, to consider its halls and cloisters the most
delightful place in the world. And what the Palace may then become,
what a perennial fountain it may prove of all that makes for the
purification and elevation of life, one would fain endeavour to
depict, but may not, for fear of the charge of extravagance.

III. There is one other point which those who have read the
correspondence and comments upon the proposed institution in the
papers have noted with amusement rather than with astonishment. It is
a point which comes out in everything that has been written on the
scheme, except by the actual founders. It is the profound distrust
with which the more wealthy classes regard the working men--not the
poor, so-called, but the working men. They do not seem even to have
begun trusting them: they speak and think of them