Gilead had left the office betimes to attend a meeting convened for the purpose of discussing the _Arts Education Bill_, a measure which it was proposed to bring before Parliament, and for whose actual initiation he himself was more than anyone responsible. Its main purpose was to reform and direct popular taste in all matters which met the eye; to prevent the disfigurement of the land; to see that desirable sites were ennobled with suitable erections; to control the abuse of advertisements; to lead the common view by the ways of beauty and fitness to an appreciation of both. The promoters of the bill, men of a rare educational foresight, founded their propaganda on the truth that, while learning is subjective, taste is objective, and that it is of little use thinking to conduct towards a millennium of good taste through groves of architectural and other abominations which outrage every principle of it. Their idea was that, as oxygen enters by the mouth to purify the living blood, so taste must be taken in at the eyes to illuminate and refine the intellectual process, and that forcibly to educate the community to an understanding of good things, while confronting and environing it with the very opposite, is to be likened to putting a man into a lazaretto for a rest-cure. In short, they believed that the era of universal gentlehood which we all desire, and can only at present see squalidly foreshadowed in the cheap presumption engendered of compulsory education, is to be approached through the eyes rather than the intellect, and that every desecrated site, every wanton outrage on nature, every vulgar, tasteless and pretentious edifice allowed to be erected is by so much a set-back to the progress of race-refinement. Wherefore they proposed in the first instance the establishment of a Governmental Board of Callaesthetics, or Beauty-Science, whose expenses should be met by a levy on the local rates, and whose business it should be to consider the external plans of every building, public and private, it was proposed to alter or erect, and to approve or, if offensive to the cultivated eye, reject the same (the control of structural details was to remain in the hands of Municipal and local bodies, since these were business matters fit for men of business and demanding only practical qualifications). The scheme, a very fond one to Gilead’s heart, need not here be discussed in detail. It aimed generally at the overthrow of the tyranny of the vulgarian; embodied a central Committee of art-experts, with official representatives in every capital town, and was immensely far-reaching in its purposes. And, if it was doomed to failure, it was not so doomed on practical grounds, but on the unquestionable liberty of the subject to make himself as offensive as he likes within the law.