d that relatively to foreign countries
England occupied three centuries ago a higher place in the
musical world than she does at the present time, and he proved
that the almost universal establishment of central and national
musical institutions abroad, and the want of such an institution
in England, had been one cause why musical progress has not in
this country kept pace with the increase of wealth and
population and the corresponding development of science and art.

"Again, the necessity of public aid formed the groundwork of
the appeal made at Manchester by the Duke of Edinburgh and
Prince Christian. Music, as they showed, is far more expensive
to teach than other arts, and the natural capacity for
instruction in music is more rare than in almost any other art.
You are compelled, then, if you would have good musicians, to
provide means by which those to whom nature has been bountiful
in giving good ears and good voices, but niggardly in giving
worldly wealth, may be sought out in their obscurity and brought
up to distinction by a proper course of instruction.

"What I have said naturally leads me to deal with free education
in music, coupled in certain cases with free maintenance of the
pupil as the first branch of the subject on which I desire to
engage your sympathies and ask your aid. This system of
gratuitous education is one of the principal features which will
distinguish the new college from the Royal Academy and other
excellent existing schools of music. I do not mean to say that
we intend to exclude paying pupils. To adopt such a course would
be to deprive musical ability in the upper classes of any means
of access to the college, and would stamp it with a narrow and
contracted character, which is above all to be avoided in a
national institution intended to include in its corporate
character all classes throughout the United Kingdom. What I seek
to create is an institution bearing the same relation to the art
of music as that which our great public schools--Eton and
Winchester, for example--bear to general education. On the one
side you have scholars who are on the foundation and educated by
means of endowments; on the other side, pupils who derive no
direct benefit from the foundation. Both classes of pupils
follow the same course of study; their teachers ar