pirit.

Not the time for a "professor of aesthetics," one would say, and
assuredly not the place. One wonders whether Zululand would not be
more favourable for such a man than England. Germany, France, and
Italy have many positions in universities, picture-galleries, museums,
opera houses for lovers of the beautiful, and above all an educated
respect for artists and writers just as they have places too for
servants of Truth in chemical laboratories and polytechnics endowed by
the State with excellent results even from the utilitarian point of
view. But rich England has only a few dozen such places in all at
command and these are usually allotted with a cynical contempt for
merit; miserable anarchic England, soul-starved amid its creature
comforts, proving now by way of example to helots that man cannot live
by bread alone:--England and Oscar Wilde! the "Black Country" and
"the professor of aesthetics"--a mad world, my masters!

It is necessary for us now to face this mournful truth that in the
quarrel between these two the faults were not all on one side, mayhap
England was even further removed from the ideal than the would-be
professor of aesthetics, which fact may well give us pause and food for
thought. Organic progress we have been told; indeed, might have seen
if we had eyes, evolution so-called is from the simple to the complex;
our rulers therefore should have provided for the ever-growing
complexity of modern life and modern men. The good gardener will even
make it his ambition to produce new species; our politicians, however,
will not take the trouble to give even the new species that appear a
chance of living; they are too busy, it appears, in keeping their
jobs.

No new profession has been organized in England since the Middle Ages.
In the meantime we have invented new arts, new sciences and new
letters; when will these be organized and regimented in new and living
professions, so that young ingenuous souls may find suitable fields
for their powers and may not be forced willy-nilly to grub for pignuts
when it would be more profitable for them and for us to use their
nobler faculties? Not only are the poor poorer and more numerous in
England than elsewhere; but there is less provision made for the
"intellectuals" too, consequently the organism is suffering at both
extremities. It is high time that both maladies were taken in hand,
for by universal consent England is now about the worst organized of
all mod