It is a cruel thing--a most cruel thing--to destroy wantonly anything
that is venerable with age and associated with the memories of the
past. It was a horrible thing to destroy that old Hospital. But it is
gone. The house of Shams and Shadows in Regent's Park has got nothing
whatever to do with it. Its revenues did not make the old Hospital;
that was made up by its ancient church; by the old buildings clustered
round the church; by the old customs of the Precinct, with its Courts,
temporal and spiritual, its offices and its prison; by its
burial-grounds, with its Bedesmen and Bedeswomen, and by the rough
sailor population which dwelt in its narrow lanes and courts. How
_could_ that place be allowed to suffer destruction? But when the old
thing is gone we must cast about for the best uses of anything which
once belonged to it. And of all the uses to which the revenues of the
old Hospital might be put, the present seems the most unfit and the
least worthy.
Again, if Queen Matilda in these days wished to do a good work, what
would she found? There are many purposes for which benevolent persons
bequeath and grant money. They are not the old purposes. They all
mean, nowadays, the advancement and bettering of the people.
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