238 Memorial of George Bnnvn Goodc. 



pie's vested fund." It brings not only world-wide reputation, but many- 

 visitors and consequent commercial advantage. What Alpine scenery is 

 to vSwitzerland, museums are to many neighboring nations. Some one 

 has written that the Venus of Melos has brought more wealth to Paris 

 than the Queen of vSheba brought to King Solomon, and that but for the 

 possession of their collections (which are intrinsically so much treasure) 

 Rome and Florence would be impoverished towns. 



This is thoroughly understood by the rulers of modern Italy. We are 

 told that the first act of Garibaldi, after he had entered Naples in i860, 

 was to proclaim the city of Pompeii the property of the nation, and to 

 increase the appropriation for excavations, so that these might be carried 

 on with greater activity. " He appreciated the fact that a nation which 

 owns a gold mine ought to work it, and that Pompeii could be made for 

 Naples and for Italy a source of wealth more productive than the gold 

 mines of Sacramento." If capital is an accumulation of labor, as econo- 

 mists sa}^, w^orks of art, which are the result of the highest type of labor, 

 must be capital of the most productive character. A country which has 

 rich museums attracts to itself the money of travelers, even though it 

 may have no other source of wealth. If, besides, the populace is made 

 to understand the interest which is possessed by their treasures of art, 

 they are inspired with the desire to produce others of the same kind ; 

 and so, labor increasing capital, there is infinite possibility for the growth 

 of national societies devoted to the formation of museums, to their main- 

 tenance, and to the education of the people by this means. 



Suggestive in this same connection was the remark of Sir William 

 Flower to the effect that the largest museum yet erected, with all its 

 internal fittings, "has not cost so much as a single fully-equipped line of 

 battle ship, which in a few years may be either at the bottom of the sea 

 or so obsolete in construction as to be worth no more than the material 

 of which it is made." 



Comment. — This principle was well stated more than half a century ago by 

 Henry Edwards in his treatise on the Administrative economy of the fine arts in 

 England, as follows: In addition to the broa.d principle that the public funds 

 can never be better employed than in the establishment of institutions tending at 

 once to refine the feeling and to improve the industry of the whole population, 

 there is the subordinate, but yet important, ground of inducing and enabling private 

 persons greatly to benefit the public by contributing toward the same end. No 

 country [he continues] has more caiise to be proiid of that munificent spirit of 

 liljerality which leads private individuals to present or bequeath to the community 

 valuable collections which it has been the labor of their lives to form; but to give 

 due effect to this liberality and to make that effect permanent, it is necessary that 

 the State step in and contribute its sanction and its assistance; and in many cases 

 the very munificence of spirit which has formed an immense collection and given 

 birth to the wish to make it national has, by its own excess, made that wish power- 

 less without the active aid of the legislature. The actual cost, and still more the 

 inherent value, of the collections of Sloane, Elgin, and Angerstein made them in 

 reality gifts to the nation, although they could never have been acquired (without 



