Room for the Fine Arts.

This is Tennyson's picture of the ideal community. Have the fine arts any place in this ideal state? They have a most important place. Tennyson's description is really of a community where there are the good, the beautiful, and the true. Without the good, no proper social life is possible. If sin, and want, and care, and party feeling are present, there is no brotherhood; there is an absence of citizenship feeling, and without a worship of truth there is no foundation for any real ethics—we are in the depths of darkness—and without a love of the beautiful we cannot expect to have "sweeter manners" or "purer laws." One test of our civilisation is, how are the fine arts—architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry—esteemed in our community? In reading the past history of man, we recognise that when the cave men were able in a poor way to scratch on a stone or on a horn, or paint on the sides of their cave-dwelling some picture of the animals that dwelt near them, that the cave men had taken a step forward in an upward path towards the good, the beautiful, and the true. They were marching to civilisation. Thousands of years have passed since the beginning of pictorial art, and mankind has made great progress; but even in that branch page 6 of the fine arts we have not readied the goal. We wish that each year and every year that the New Year bells may bring amongst us the sense of goodness, of beauty, and of truth. It is only when these things are "rung in" and become part of us that we have brotherhood and peace.