be expressed, but because art seems to offer a pleasant and genteel career.  When the income is assured the number of those who fancy art as a profession will not diminish.  On the contrary, in the great State of the future the competition will be appalling.  I can imagine the squeezing and intriguing between the friends of applicants and their parliamentary deputies, between the deputies and the Minister of Fine Arts; and I can imagine the art produced to fulfil a popular mandate in the days when private jobbery will be the only check on public taste.  Can we not all imagine the sort of man that would be chosen?  Have we no experience of what the people love?  Comrades, dear democratic ladies and gentlemen, pursue, by all means, your schemes for righting the world, dream your dreams, conceive Utopias, but leave the artists out.  For, tell me honestly, does any one of you believe that during the last three hundred years a single good artist would have been supported by your system?  And remember, unless it had supported him it would not have allowed him to exist.  Remember, too, that you will have to select or reject your artists while yet they are students—­you will not be able to wait until a name has been imposed on you by years of reputation with a few good judges.  If Degas is now reverenced as a master that is because his pictures fetch long prices, and his pictures fetch long prices because a handful of people who would soon have been put under the great civic pump have been for years proclaiming his mastery.  And during those long years how has Degas lived?  On the bounty of the people who love all things beautiful, or on the intelligence and discrimination of a few rich or richish patrons?  In the great State you will not be able to take your masters ready-made with years of reputation behind them; you will have to pick them yourselves, and pick them young.

Here you are, then, at the door of your annual exhibition of students’ work; you are come to choose two State pensioners, and pack the rest off to clean the drains of Melbourne.  They will be chosen by popular vote—­the only fair way of inducting a public entertainer to a snug billet.  But, unknown to you, I have placed amongst the exhibits two drawings by Claude and one by Ingres; and at this exhibition there are no names on the catalogue.  Do you think my men will get a single vote?  Possibly; but dare one of you suggest that in competition with any rubbishy sensation-monger either of them will stand a chance?  “Oh, but,” you say, “in the great new State everyone will be well educated.”  “Let them,” I reply, “be as well educated as the M.A.s of Oxford and Cambridge who have been educated from six to six-and-twenty:  and I suggest that to do even that will come pretty dear.  Well, then, submit your anonymous collection of pictures to people qualified to elect members of parliament for our two ancient universities, and you know perfectly well that you will get no better result.  So, don’t be silly:  even private patronage is less fatal to art than public.  Whatever else you may get, you will never get an artist by popular election.”