While accurate predictions about the future course of relations between Government and the arts in Britain are not, of course, possible, it seems likely, however, that all of mankind will be found with more, rather than less, leisure in the years to come. In the days of the industrial revolution in Britain a hundred-odd years ago, the people, by which I mean the working classes, had little opportunity for cultivating a taste for the arts. Now, with the average number of hours worked by British men, thanks to trade unionism and a more genuinely progressive and humanitarian point of view, standing at something under forty-seven weekly, there is obviously less time devoted to earning a living, leaving more for learning the art of living. It may well be that the next hundred years will see even more intensive efforts made to help people to use their leisure hours pleasantly and profitably. As long ago as the early 1930’s, at a time when he was so instrumental in encouraging ballet through the founding of the Camargo Society, Lord (then J. Maynard) Keynes wrote that he hoped and believed the day would come when the problem of earning one’s daily bread might not be the most important one of our lives, and that “the arena of the heart and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems--the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.” Then, “for the first time since his creation,” Lord Keynes continued, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem--how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure science and compound interest will have won for him to live wisely and agreeably and well.” * * * * * Stripped to the simplest explanation possible, Sadler’s Wells leased its company to Covent Garden for a period of years. The move must have entailed a prodigious amount of work for all concerned and for Ninette de Valois in particular. Quite apart from all the physical detail involved: new scenery, new musical material, new costumes, more dancers, there was, most importantly, a change of point of view, even of direction. With a large theatre and orchestra, and large responsibilities, experimental works for the moment had to be postponed. New thinking had to be employed, because the company’s direction was now in the terms of the Maryinsky Theatre, the Bolshoi, the Paris Opéra.