part sincerely and single-mindedly hate and despise the arts; and
you know well that as the leaders are, so must the people be; and
that means that we who are met together here for the furthering of
Art by wide-spread education are either deceiving ourselves and
wasting our time, since we shall one day be of the same opinion as
the best men among us, or else we represent a small minority that is
right, as minorities sometimes are, while those upright men
aforesaid, and the great mass of civilised men, have been blinded by
untoward circumstances.

That we are of this mind--the minority that is right--is, I hope,
the case. I hope we know assuredly that the arts we have met
together to further are necessary to the life of man, if the
progress of civilisation is not to be as causeless as the turning of
a wheel that makes nothing.

How, then, shall we, the minority, carry out the duty which our
position thrusts upon us, of striving to grow into a majority?

If we could only explain to those thoughtful men, and the millions
of whom they are the flower, what the thing is that we love, which
is to us as the bread we eat, and the air we breathe, but about
which they know nothing and feel nothing, save a vague instinct of
repulsion, then the seed of victory might be sown. This is hard
indeed to do; yet if we ponder upon a chapter of ancient or
mediaeval history, it seems to me some glimmer of a chance of doing
so breaks in upon us. Take for example a century of the Byzantine
Empire, weary yourselves with reading the names of the pedants,
tyrants, and tax-gatherers to whom the terrible chain which long-
dead Rome once forged, still gave the power of cheating people into