Museums in the Present and Future

Extract

The intelligent world has of late been passing through one of its cyclical phases. It would hardly be suspected that in these times the daily tale of news from home and abroad should be so wanting in human interest that it was necessary to seek for recondite subjects. Nevertheless astute editors or others on the staff of our daily newspapers have been constrained to discover that all is not well in our artistic atmosphere, and they call attention to the sad need of refinement in our surroundings, that our street architecture, though showing signs of grace, lacks coherence and taste, that our statues are deplorable, our public monuments wanting in dignity or design, and that, in fine, the necessity for organization and method is called for as much for our spiritual betterment as it is on the material side. A number of distinguished men, architects, painters, and critics of both, and of all else, have come forward, and their plans for a new and glorified earth have been placed before a grateful world.