There is one more point which must be touched with tenderness but which cannot be honestly passed over in silence. It could nowhere be mentioned less invidiously than under the roof of an institution which is at once an effort to create high tastes in working men and a proof that such tastes can be created. The period of transition from high to low wages and from incessant toil to comparative leisure must be one of peril to masses whom no Mechanics Institute or Literary Society as yet counts among its members. It is the more so because there is abroad in all classes a passion for sensual enjoyment and excitement produced by the vast development of wealth and at the same time as I suspect by the temporary failure of those beliefs which combat the sensual appetites and sustain our spiritual life. Colliers drinking champagne. The world stands aghast. Well, I see no reason why a collier should not drink champagne if he can afford it as well as a Duke. The collier wants and perhaps deserves it more if he has been working all the week underground and at risk of his life. Hard labour naturally produces a craving for animal enjoyment and so does the monotony of the factory unrelieved by interest in the work. But what if the collier cannot afford the champagne or if the whole of his increase of wages is wasted on it while his habitation remains a hovel, everything about him is still as filthy, comfortless and barbarous as ever and (saddest of all) his wife and children are no better off, perhaps are worse off than before? What if his powers of work are being impaired by debauchery and he is thus surely losing the footing which he has won on the higher round of the industrial ladder and lapsing back into penury and despair? What if instead of gaining he is really losing in manhood and real independence? I see nothing shocking in the fact that a mechanic's wages are now equal to those of a clergyman, or an officer in the army who has spent perhaps thousands of dollars on his education. Every man has a right to whatever his labour will fetch. But I do see something shocking in the appearance of the highly paid mechanic, whenever hard times come, as a mendicant at the door of a man really poorer than himself. Not only that English poor-law, of which we spoke, but all poor-laws, formal or informal, must cease when the labourer has the means, with proper self-control and prudence, of providing for winter as well as summer, for hard times as well as good times, for his family as well as for himself. The tradition of a by-gone state of society must be broken. The nominally rich must no longer be expected to take care of the nominally poor. The labourer has ceased to be in any sense a slave. He must learn to be, in every sense, a man.