minor arts, the history, the dancing, and the rest--the schools will
depend wholly upon volunteer teachers.

We must not disguise the audacity of the scheme. There are, I believe,
in London alone 120 schools, for which 2,400 volunteers will be
required. They must not be mere amateurs or kindly, benevolent people,
who will lightly or in a fit of enthusiasm undertake the work, and
after a month or so throw it over in weariness of the drudgery; they
must be honest workers, who will give thought and take trouble over
the work they have in hand, who will keep to their time, stick to
their engagement, study the art of teaching, and be amenable to order
and discipline. Are there so many as 2,400 such teachers to be found
in London, without counting the many thousands wanted for the rest of
the country? It seems a good-sized army of volunteers to raise.

Let us, however, consider. First, there is the hopeful fact that the
Sunday-School Union numbers 12,000 teachers--all voluntary and
unpaid--in London alone. There is, next, another hopeful fact in the
rapid development of the Home Arts Association, which has existed for
no more than a year or two. The teaching is wholly voluntary; and
volunteers are crowding in faster than the slender means of the
Society can provide schools for them to teach in, and the machinery,
materials, and tools to teach with. Even with these facts before us,
the projector and dreamer of the scheme may appear a bold man when he
asks for 2,400 men and women to help him, not in a religious but a
purely secular scheme. Yet it may not appear to many people purely
secular when they remember that he asks for this large army of
unselfish men and women--so unselfish as to give some of their time,
thought, and activity for nothing, not even praise, but only out of
love for the children--from a population of four millions, all of whom