When from time to time “brain-workers” write to the newspapers to suggest that street musicians should be suppressed I feel that the hour has almost come to start a movement in favour of Votes for Children. It is disgraceful, ladies and gentlemen, that this important section of the community, on whom the whole future of the nation depends, should have no voice in the forming of the nation’s laws! This question of street-organs cannot be solved by banishing them to the slums without depriving many children of a legitimate pleasure. For, _sub rosa_, the children of Park Lane—if there are any children in Park Lane—and even the children of “brain-workers,” appreciate the music of street organs quite as much as their humble contemporaries. While father buries his head under the sofa-cushions and composes furious letters to the _Times_ in that stuffy hermitage, little noses are pressed against the window-pane, little hands applaud, and little feet beat time on the nursery floor upstairs. This is one of those situations where it is permissible to sympathise with all parties, and unless father can achieve an almost inhuman spirit of tolerance I see no satisfactory solution. For children must have music; they must have tunes to think to and laugh to and live to. Funeral marches to the grave are all very well for the elderly and disillusioned, but youth must tread a more lively measure. And this music should come like the sunshine in winter, surprisingly, at no fixed hour, as though it were a natural consequence of life. One of the gladdest things about the organ-man in our childhood was the unexpectedness of his coming. Life would be dragging a little in schoolroom circles, when suddenly we would hear the organ clearing its throat as it were; we would all run to the window to wave our hands to the smiling musician, and shout affectionate messages to his intelligent monkey, who caught our pennies in his little pointed cap. In those days we had all made up our minds that when we grew up we would have an organ and a monkey of our own. I think it is rather a pity that with age we forget these lofty resolutions of our childhood. I have formed a conception of the ideal street-organist that would only be fulfilled by some one who had realised the romance of that calling in their youth.