The nation at present leaves it to commercial interest and to philanthropy to carry out, in some measure, this important function, and we may at once eliminate the commercial interest. It supplies, at a proper profit, what is demanded. A minority ask for cheap works of science and art and history, and several admirable series of manuals and serial publications are supplied. A majority, an overwhelming majority, asks only to be entertained, and there is a mighty flood of novels and amusing works, a rich crop of music-halls and bioscope-shows and theatres and skating rinks. It will readily be understood that, regarding happiness as the ultimate ideal, I regard entertainment as a proper part of life. The comedian and the story-teller and the professional football-player are rendering good service, and it is intellectual snobbery to murmur that they "merely entertain" people. A good deal of nonsense is written about sport and entertainment. Many of us can, with pleasant ease, suspend a severely intellectual task for a few hours to witness a first-class football match. One wonders if some of the ascetics who speak about "mudded oafs" and "the football craze" are aware that the game (except for professional players) occupies merely an hour and a half a week (or alternate week) for little more than half a year. The mischief is that so much of our entertainment appeals to and fosters a state of mind or taste which does exclude culture. We have to-day an army of puritan scouts, watching our music-halls and cinematograph films, our picture-cards and novels, our open spaces by night and our bathing-beaches by day, calculating minutely what amount of dress or undress or sexual allusion they may permit. Certainly we need coercion in these matters. No one who moves amongst our average people, in any rank of society, can fail to recognise that there would be in time a volcanic outpour of sexuality if we did not impose restriction. Whether this chaste pruriency of the modern Churches is an admirable thing, and whether its hirelings are a desirable supplement to the police-force, need not be discussed here; but what amuses one is their intense zeal to detect the narrowest fringe of impropriety and their utter obtuseness to graver matters. I have sometimes, when waiting before a lecture in the dressing-room of a variety theatre, been confronted with a notice that "the curtain will be rung down on any artist who says 'Damn' or mentions the lodger," or, more candidly (in the Colonies): "Don't swear. We don't care a damn, but the public does." The general public would, if it were consulted, probably make the same reply as the framers of the notice, and would blame the police for the restriction of liberty. There is, in a word, an appalling poverty of taste in the general public, and it pays the purveyor of entertainment to adapt his wares to it as far as the police will permit. To this lamentable lack of