Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/802

 corps and competition give to outdoor recreation—the club subscriptions being limited to the providing of prizes. Bands ought also to be provided at the public expense to play in the parks during the spring and summer months on the afternoons of holidays and Sundays. The importance of this latter provision can not be too highly rated; for experience shows that wherever it has been tried its success has been astonishing. For instance, Lord Thurlow, quoting from Sir Benjamin Hall, stated to the House of Lords, on the 5th of May, that the Sunday visitors to Kensington Gardens had, by the band playing there, been increased from 7,000 to 80,000 in one day, and in the Regent's and Victoria Parks 190,000 had been attracted by the bands in one afternoon. When we consider what an amount of health, happiness, and refining influence these numbers represent as produced by a single cause, we blush for the narrow fanaticism which, in the name of religion, does all it can to deny to the working-classes the elevating influence of music on the only day that the toil of life admits of their obtaining it. I hold it to be impossible too strongly to deprecate the downright immorality of driving the working-classes by thousands into the pot-houses by depriving them of the innocent and refining enjoyment of music in the open air. Surely the common sense of the public, as a whole, is not so degraded by bigotry that, in the face of the figures I have quoted, there can any longer be a question in the public mind on the positive sin of allowing a puritanical spirit in the few to domineer over the health, the happiness, and the morals of the many.

Somewhat similar remarks apply to the question of opening museums and art-galleries on Sundays, though on this question the Sabbatarians include among their ranks a greater proportional number of the community. In the debate of 'the 5th of May, to which I have already alluded, both Church and State, in so far as they are represented in the persons of the Primate and the Premier, spoke strongly against any reform in this direction; and, perhaps owing to this weight of united authority, the proposed reform was negatived by a majority of eight. Yet, when we examine the arguments which these high authorities were able to produce, we find them to be conspicuously of the feeblest kind. The leading argument both of the Prime Minister and of the Archbishop was that there is not sufficient evidence "of a very predominant sentiment" in favor of the reform on the part of workingmen themselves. Now, to this it may be answered; in the first place, that a poll on the question has not been taken, and that, therefore, it is a mere begging of the question to say that workingmen as a class "in all probability" do not desire the change. But, even if we grant that the working-classes as a whole are as apathetic upon the subject as they are represented to be, I do not see that this is any valid reason against reform. Possibly enough, the members of the House of Lords have a higher appreciation of the value of science-museums