In the ’fifties and ’sixties people had very few opportunities of listening to good music and hearing accomplished artistes. Public entertainments were nothing like so numerous as they are to-day, and the few that did happen to be organised in Glasgow, indeed in Scotland, in 1853 were so prohibitively priced that the great mass of the people simply could not attend them. Broadly speaking, if people wanted amusement in my young days, they had either to go to some neighbouring public-house or to one of the few music-halls that existed then. There, naturally enough, the programmes were somewhat coarse and unelevating; and it was to wean folks from the unhealthy atmosphere of the squalid public-house and the low down music-hall, as well as to satisfy the universal longing for good music, that the Glasgow Abstainers’ Union concerts and other similar social welfare movements were inaugurated. << less