It is from the realities of life that the highest idealities are born. The philosopher may reason with unerring logic, and show us where the world is wrong. The economist may tell us of the progress and poverty that go hand in hand; but these are theories, and the abstract cannot suffer pain. Dickens went out into the streets of the great city and found poor little Jo sweeping the crossing with his broom. All around was the luxury and the elegance, which the rich have ever appropriated to themselves; great mansions, fine carriages, beautiful dresses, but in all the great city of houses and homes, poor little Jo could find no place to lay his head. His home was in the street, and every time he halted for a moment in the throng, the policeman touched him with his club and bade him “move on.” At last, ragged, wretched, almost dead with “moving on,” he sank down upon the cold stone steps of a magnificent building erected for “The Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.” As we think of wretched, ragged Jo in the midst of all this luxury and wealth, we see the tens of thousands of other waifs in the great cities of the world, and we condemn the so-called civilization of the earth that builds the mansions of the rich and great upon the rags and miseries of the poor. The true realist cannot worship at the shrine of power, nor prostitute his gifts for gold. With an artist’s eye he sees the world exactly as it is, and tells the story faithful unto life. He feels for every heart that beats, else he could not paint them as he does. It takes the soul to warm a statue into life and make living flesh and coursing blood, and each true picture that he paints or draws makes the world a better place in which to live. The artists of the realistic school have a sense so fine that they cannot help but catch the inspiration that is filling all the world’s best minds with the hope of greater justice and more equal social life. With the vision of the seer they feel the coming dawn when true equality shall reign upon the earth; the time when democracy shall no more be confined to constitutions and to laws, but will be a part of human life. The greatest artists of the world to-day are telling facts and painting scenes that cause humanity to stop, and think, and ask why one should be a master and another be a serf; why a portion of the world should toil and spin, should wear away its strength and life, that the rest should live in idleness and ease.