and gentlemen in return for no services rendered or even
pretended. Ten thousand pounds a year would run a magnificent school
of industrial education; it would teach thousands of lads and girls
how to use their heads and hands; it would be a perennial living
stream, changing the thirsty desert into flowery meads and fruitful
vineyards; it would save thousands of boys from the dreadful doom--a
thing of these latter days--of being able to learn no trade; it would
dignify thousands, and tens of thousands, of lives with the knowledge
and mastery of a craft; it would save from degradation and from
slavery thousands of women; it would restrain thousands of men from
the beery slums of drink and crime. Above all--perhaps this is the
main consideration--the judicious employment of ten thousand pounds a
year would be presently worth many millions a year to London from the
skilled labour it would cultivate and the many arts it would develop
and foster.

It is a cruel thing--a most cruel thing--to destroy wantonly anything
that is venerable with age and associated with the memories of the
past. It was a horrible thing to destroy that old Hospital. But it is
gone. The house of Shams and Shadows in Regent's Park has got nothing
whatever to do with it. Its revenues did not make the old Hospital;
that was made up by its ancient church; by the old buildings clustered
round the church; by the old customs of the Precinct, with its Courts,
temporal and spiritual, its offices and its prison; by its
burial-grounds, with its Bedesmen and Bedeswomen, and by the rough
sailor population which dwelt in its narrow lanes and courts. How
_could_ that place be allowed to suffer destruction? But when the old
thing is gone we must cast about for the best uses of anything which
once belonged to it. And of all the uses to which the revenues of the
old Hospital might be put, the present seems the most unfit and the
least worthy.

Again, if Queen Matilda in these days wished to do a good work, what
would she found? There are many purposes for which benevolent persons
bequeath and grant money. They are not the old purposes. They all
mean, nowadays, the advancement and bettering of the people. A great
lady spends thousands in founding a market; a man with much money
presents a free library to his native town; collections are made for
hospitals; everything is for the bettering of the people. We have not
yet advanced to the stage of bettering he rich people;