Nevertheless, in this district a crowd has been found willing, on many a winter’s night, to come and listen to parts of an oratorio or to selections of classical music. The oratorios have sometimes been given in a church by various bodies of amateurs who have practised together for the purpose; the concerts have been given in schoolrooms on Sunday evenings by professionals of reputation. To the oratorios men and women have come, some of them from the low haunts kept around the city by its carelessly administered charity, all of them of the class which, working for its daily bread, has no margin of time for study. Amid those who are generally so independent of restraint, who cough and move as they will, there has been a death-like stillness as they have listened to some fine solo of Handel’s. On faces which are seldom free of the marks of care, except in the excitement of drink, a calm has seemed to settle and tears to flow, for no reason but because “it is so beautiful!” Sometimes the music has appeared to break gradually down barriers that shut out some poor fellow from a fairer past or a better future than his present: the oppressive weight of the daily care lifts, other sights are in his vision, and at last, covering his face or sinking on his knees, he makes prayers which cannot be uttered. Sometimes it has seemed to seize one on business bent, to transport him suddenly to another world, and, not knowing what he feels, has forced him to say, “It was good to be here”. A church filled with hundreds of East Londoners, affected, doubtless, in different ways, but all silent, reverent, and self-forgetful, is a sight not to be forgotten or to be held to have no meaning. To the concerts have crowded hard-headed, unimaginative men, described in a local paper as being “friends of Bradlaugh”. These have listened to and evidently taken in difficult movements of Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin. The loud applause which has followed some moments of strained, rapt attention has proclaimed the universal feeling. With a knowledge of the character of the music, the applications for admission have increased, and the announcement of a hope that the concerts might be continued the following winter, and possibly also extended to weekday evenings, has brought from some of those present an expression of their desire for other high-class music. The poor quarters of cities have been too long treated as if their inhabitants were deficient in that which is noblest in human nature. Human beings want not something which will do, but the best.