CAUSES OF SUCCESS 31 



Mr. Bruce Findlay, offered iJ'iooo in prizes at their 

 June Show, men shook empty heads, and murmured 

 ' Madness/ What was the result ? The receipts 

 one Whitsuntide exceeded sixteen hundred pounds; 

 and of this, Eleven Hundred was paid by the working- 

 classes in shillings ! 



And all honour to such men as George Peabody, 

 the American merchant, who 'with more than 

 princely munificence' (as the Queen of England 

 wrote), * bestowed more than a million and a half 

 of money to promote education and to relieve 

 poverty, including, for the latter purpose, eighteen 

 groups of commodious and healthful homes for 

 the working-classes in various parts of the city of 

 London. I was present at an exhibition of window 

 plants, held in Dean's Yard, Westminster, and I 

 noticed that a large proportion of the prizes were 

 won by the tenants of ' Peabody's Buildings.' Life, 

 vegetable or human, dwindles and collapses in 

 polluted air ; and as the plant is defiled by dirt 

 and devoured by vermin, so is the man enfeebled 

 by disease and degraded by vice. How can you 

 expect (asked Lord Derby, known as ' the Rupert of 

 Debate ') those who live in an atmosphere which 

 would kill an oak, to abstain from stimulants. And 

 therefore there can be no truer philanthropists, no 

 wiser statesmen, than those who would recover 



