perfection hardly if at all inferior to that of several hundred years
earlier.
    On this the same evils recurred. Sculptors obtained high prices - the art
became a trade - schools arose which professed to sell the holy spirit of art
for money; pupils flocked from far and near to buy it, in the hopes of selling
it later on, and were struck purblind as a punishment for the sin of those who
sent them. Before long a second iconoclastic fury would infallibly have
followed, but for the prescience of a statesman who succeeded in passing an Act
to the effect that no statue of any public man or woman should be allowed to
remain unbroken for more than fifty years, unless at the end of that time a jury
of twenty-four men taken at random from the street pronounced in favour of its
being allowed a second fifty years of life. Every fifty years this
reconsideration was to be repeated, and unless there was a majority of eighteen
in favour of the retention of the statue, it was to be destroyed.
    Perhaps a simpler plan would have been to forbid the erection of a statue to
any public man or woman till he or she had been dead at least one hundred years,
and even then to insist on reconsideration of the claims of the deceased and the
merit of the statue every fifty years - but the working of the Act brought about
results that on the whole were satisfactory. For in the first place, many public
statues that would have been voted under the old system, were not ordered, when
it was known that they would be almost certainly broken up after fifty years,
and in the second, public sculptors knowing their work to be so ephemeral,
scamped it to an extent that made it offensive even to the most uncultured eye.
Hence before long subscribers took to paying the sculptor for the statute of
their dead statesmen, on condition that he did not make it. The tribute of
respect was thus paid to the deceased, the public sculptors were not mulcted,
and the rest of the public suffered no inconvenience.
    I was told, however, that an abuse of this custom is growing up, inasmuch as
the competition for the commission not to make a statue is so keen, that
sculptors have been known to return a considerable part of the purchase money to
the subscribers, by an arrangement made with them beforehand. Such transactions,
however, are always clandestine. A small inscription is let into the pavement,
where the public statue would have stood, which informs the reader that such a
statue has been ordered for the person, whoever he or she may be, but that