782 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



corps and competition give to outdoor recreation the club subscrip- 

 tions being limited to the providing of prizes. Bands ought also to 

 be provided at the public expense to play in the parks during the 

 spring and summer months on the afternoons of holidays and Sundays. 

 The importance of this latter provision can not be too highly rated ; 

 for experience shows that wherever it has been tried its success has 

 been astonishing. For instance, Lord Thurlow, quoting from Sir 

 Benjamin Hall, stated to the House of Lords, on the 5th of May, that 

 the Sunday visitors to Kensington Gardens had, by the band playing 

 there, been increased from 7,000 to 80,000 in one day, and in the 

 Regent's and Victoria Parks 190,000 had been attracted by the bands 

 in one afternoon. When we consider what an amount of health, hap- 

 piness, and refining influence these numbers represent as produced by 

 a single cause, we blush for the narrow fanaticism which, in the name 

 of religion, does all it can to deny to the working-classes the elevating 

 influence of music on the only day that the toil of life admits of their 

 obtaining it. I hold it to be impossible too strongly to deprecate the 

 downright immorality of driving the working-classes by thousands 

 into the pot-houses by depriving them of the innocent and refining en- 

 joyment of music in the open air. Surely the common sense of the 

 public, as a whole, is not so degraded by bigotry that, in the face of 

 the figures I have quoted, there can any longer be a question in the 

 public mind on the positive sin of allowing a puritanical spirit in the 

 few to domineer over the health, the happiness, and the morals of the 

 many. 



Somewhat similar remarks apply to the question of opening muse- 

 ums and art-galleries on Sundays, though on this question the Sabba- 

 tarians include among their ranks a greater proportional number of 

 the community. In the debate of 'the 5th of May, to which I have 

 already alluded, both Church and State, in so far as they are repre- 

 sented in the persons of the Primate and the Premier, spoke strongly 

 against any reform in this direction ; and, perhaps owing to this weight 

 of united authority, the proposed reform was negatived by a majority 

 of eight. Yet, when we examine the arguments which these high 

 authorities were able to produce, we find them to be conspicuously of 

 the feeblest kind. The leading argument both of the Prime Minister 

 and of the Archbishop was that there is not sufficient evidence " of a 

 very predominant sentiment " in favor of the reform on the part of 

 workingmen themselves. Now, to this it may be answered; in the first 

 place, that a poll on the question has not been taken, and that, there- 

 fore, it is a mere begging of the question to say that workingmen as 

 a class " in all probability " do not desire the change. But, even if 

 we grant that the working-classes as a whole are as apathetic upon the 

 subject as they are represented to be, I do not see that this is any valid 

 reason against reform. Possibly enough, the members of the House 

 of Lords have a higher appreciation of the value of science-museums 



