Now to some of you I must have seemed, in all conscience, gloomy and pessimistic in my outlook on present conditions; and therefore, before I end, I will try to emit a ray of hope. There are certain social developments going on around us which make me hope that we may yet emerge from this valley of the shadows through which we are still stumbling. One is that there has been in the last generation a very general breakdown of the old artificial class notion of the kind of work which was compatible with “gentility.” And one meets to-day people, whose culture has given them every chance to develop that standard of honour toward life (without which their claim to be gentry means nothing); you meet with many such people nowadays who have come back to manual labour in various forms, in farming, in horticulture, and in craftsmanship--some also, I am glad to say, who have become shopkeepers--and who are bringing, presumably, their standard of honour to bear on those trades on which they no longer foolishly look down. Among these a definite revival of handicraft is taking place, and where they are doing their work honestly and well they are undoubtedly inculcating a better taste. It is especially among this class which has come back to handicraft that one meets with domestic interiors of a fine and scrupulous simplicity which we may eventually see imitated (meretriciously, perhaps, but on the whole beneficially) even in lodging-houses which are at present the dust-hung mausoleums of the aesthetic movement of thirty years ago. Another matter for congratulation--not a movement, but a survival--is the unspoiled tradition of beauty which still exists in the cottage gardens of England. There, in our villages, you find a note of beauty that has scarcely been touched by the evil of our modern conditions. And I take it as a proof that where, by some happy chance, we have managed to “let well alone,” there the instinct for beauty and for fitness is still a natural ingredient of industrial life. That survival of taste in our cottage gardens is culture in the best sense of the word; and it is still popular. We do not yet dig our gardens by machinery; when we do they will die the death. And two other bright points of movement, which I look to as having in them the basis of a true Art training, are the widespread revival, in so many of our towns and villages, through the efforts of Miss Mary Neal, Mr. Cecil Sharp and others, of our old folk-songs and Morris dances, and lastly--perhaps I shall surprise you--the Boy Scout movement.