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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 statue 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 as yet the sculptor has
not been able to complete it. There has been no Act to repress statues
that are intended for private consumption, but as I have said, the custom
is falling into desuetude.

Returning to Erewhonian customs in connection with death, there is one
which I can hardly pass over. When any one dies, the friends of the
family write no letters of condolence, neither do they attend the
scattering, nor wear mourning, but they send little boxes filled with
artificial tears, and with the name of the sender painted neatly upon the

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