hey wouldn't, but if they would--we'd be strong enough to elect
a president on a platform calling for a prohibitive tariff against the
foreign-pauper-labor Old Masters of Europe.

While we were about it our league could probably do something in the
interests of sculpture. It is apparent to any fair-minded person that
sculpture has been very much overdone in this country. It seems to us
there should be a law against perpetuating any of our great men in
marble or bronze or stone or amalgam fillings until after he has been
dead a couple of hundred years, and by that time a fresh crop ought to
be coming on and probably we shall have lost the desire to create such
statues.

A great man who cannot live in the affectionate and grateful memories of
his fellow countrymen isn't liable to live if you put up statues of him;
that, however, is not the main point.

The artistic aspect is the thing to consider. So few of our great men
have been really pretty to look at. Andrew Jackson made a considerable
dent in the history of his period, but when it comes to beauty, there
isn't a floor-walker in a department store anywhere that hasn't got him
backed clear off the pedestal. In addition to that, the sort of clothes
we've been wearing for the last century or so do not show up especially
well in marble. Putting classical draperies on our departed solons has
been tried, but carving a statesman with only a towel draped over him,
like a Roman senator coming out of a Turkish bath, is a departure from
the real facts and must be embarrassing to his shade. The greatest
celebrities were ever the most modest of men. I'll bet the spirit of the
Father of His Country blushes every time he flits over that statue of
himself alongside the Capitol at Washington--the one showing him sitting
in a bath cabinet with nothing on but a sheet.

Sticking to the actual conditions doesn't seem to help much either.
Future generations will come and stand in front of the statue of a
leader of thought who flourished back about 1840, say, and wonder how
anybody ever had feet like those and lived. Horace Greeley's chin
whiskers no doubt looked all right on Horace when he was alive, but when
done in bronze they invariably present a droopy not to say dropsical
appearance; and the kind of bone-handled umbrella that Daniel Webster
habitually carried has never yet been successfully worked out in marble.
When you contemplate the average statue of Lincoln--and most of them,