make-believe can deceive them. And when I say this I mean that the experiment has been tried over and over again. In what are called “the slums” of the greatest American and English cities I have seen hundreds and even thousands of poor people listening to the music of Beethoven, and to a few simple words about it in rapt and tense silence, and have heard them break out into such unrestrained applause as comes only from those who are really hungry for good music. Put a good orchestra into any one of these places and you will find the best kind of an audience. Such people have no taint of hyper-criticism, no desire to talk wisely about the latest composer. They have not constructed for themselves a nice little æsthetic formula which will fit everything--a sort of protective coloring; their minds are not “made up.” Let us not misunderstand this situation. I am not writing about painting or sculpture, for I know that these arts involve certain perceptive and selective qualities of the mind which require long training. I am writing about music, which appeals to a sense differentiated and trained long before the sense for color-vibration or for beauty of form was developed, a sense which we possess in a highly developed state in very childhood. Imagine a small opera house in the lower East Side of New York or in the North End or South End of Boston, which the people there might frequent at sums within their means; imagine a small Western city with such an opera house; and compare the probable results with those now attained by our gorgeous and needlessly expensive operatic performances which, whether at home or abroad, leave little behind them but a financial vacuum, and a dim idea that somehow opera means famous “stars” singing in a highly exaggerated manner in a strange language, in stranger dramas, where motives and purposes are stranger still. Concerts and operatic performances such as I have advocated would supplement and complete our own musical activities. These paid artists would be playing and singing to us in a language we ourselves had learned by using it. Music would be domestic; we should understand it better and love it more. I am familiar with the old argument that concerts and operas so conducted would not pay. To this I reply that it is probably true. Does settlement work pay? Does a library pay? Does any altruistic endeavor anywhere pay? No; nothing of this sort ever shows a money balance on the right side of the ledger. But we do not keep that column in figures. It foots up in joy, not in dollars. The best kind of social “uplift” would be something that made people happier. The real uplift is of the soul, not of the body. Let a rift of beauty pierce the dull scene. Let us have a taste of heaven now; and let it be not yours or mine, but theirs. In music everybody makes his own heaven at the time.