You will not expect me, in complying with the custom which requires your Chairman to address a few words to you before distributing the prizes, to give you instruction about Art or Science. One who was educated, as I was, under the old system, can hardly see without a pang the improvement that has been made in education since his time. In a public school, in my day, you learned nothing of Science, Art, or Music. Having received nothing, I have nothing to give. Fortunately, the only thing of importance to be said this evening can be said without technical knowledge of any kind. The School of Art needs better accommodation. The financial details will be explained to you by those who are more conversant with them than I am. I will only say that parsimony in this matter on the part of the government or other public bodies will, in my humble opinion, be unwise. I am not for a lavish expenditure of public money, even on education. It would be a misfortune if parental duty were to be cast on the State, and parents were to be allowed to forget that they are bound to provide their children with education as well as with bread. But it seems that at this moment the soundest and even the most strictly commercial policy would counsel liberality in providing for the National Schools of Art and Science. England is labouring under commercial depression. Of the works in the manufacturing districts, many are running half time, and some, I fear, are likely, if things do not mend, to stop. When I was there the other day gloom was on all faces. Some people seem to think that the bad time will pass away of itself, and that a good time will come again like a new moon. It is a comfortable but a doubtful doctrine. And suppose the good time does not come again, the outlook for those masses and their employers is dark. A friend of mine, who is a manufacturer, said to me the other day that he had been seeing the ruins of a feudal castle, and that the sight set him thinking if factories should ever, like feudal castles, fall into decay, what their ruins would be like? They would be unromantic no doubt, even by moonlight. But much worse than the ruins of buildings would be the ruin among the people. Imagine these swarming multitudes, or any large proportion of them, left by the failure of employment without bread. It would be something like a chronic Indian famine. The wealth of England is unparalleled, unapproached in commercial history. Add Carthage to Tyre, Venice to Carthage, Amsterdam to Venice, you will not make anything like a London. Ten thousand pounds paid for a pair of china vases. A Roman noble under the Empire might have rivalled this, but the wealth of the Roman nobles was not the fruit of industry, it was the plunder of the world. You can hardly imagine how those who come fresh from a new country like Canada, or parts of the United States--a land just redeemed from the wilderness, with all its untrimmed roughness, its