ABSTRACT
Sir, – Mr. G. B. Shaw has rightly observed that many of us, including visitors to the Exhibition, are wearing shirts produced under the conditions depicted in Tom Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt.’ Indeed, with many of us it is such a shirt or no shirt at all! Yet we are respectable, highly respectable, and our outer garments are of a sober serge, nicely creased and brushed. But our lunch, the truth to tell, frequently consists of a bath bun 22 and a glass of milk; for economy in this direction, as in the matter of shirts, is our only hope of retaining our standard of respectability, and we would as soon lose that as the average self-respecting labourer would go to the workhouse. 23 We cling to it as tenaciously as to life itself.
