This is a trifling instance; but it indicates the new spirit which is now pervading and conquering the whole of Europe. The most evident proof of this triumph of American progress is the decadence or disappearance of all the schools of art. Europe was in past centuries, in harder and more difficult times than the present, the glorious mother and mistress of civilisation, because under diverse forms, she managed to create and keep going schools of literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, and music. To-day, these schools have almost all disappeared; and the few survivors, with very few exceptions, are in a state of decadence. On the other hand, schools of electricity, dyeing, weaving, mechanics, commerce, and chemistry abound and flourish; they are the only schools the masses now require. In past centuries, the states and aristocracies of Europe had in various ways protected and encouraged the arts; and this protection had been one of the principal reasons for their progress. Now this is no longer the case. The wealthy classes of Europe to-day consider it much more dignified and elegant to build motor-cars and aeroplanes than to help painting and sculpture. As to the states, if one of them tries to encourage some art, protests pour in from every side that the expenditure is a wasting of the people’s money in the most idiotic way. Italy was for centuries the mistress of the world in every art. Yet even in Italy bitter complaints are made to-day about the few millions which the public bodies have spent in the last thirty years in raising monuments to the great men of the Revolution. On the other hand, how can sculpture flourish, if nobody will pay the sculptors for the works which they are capable of executing? And for what reason is the State, which possesses ancient monuments, unable to spend another million or two on keeping alive the tradition of an art which has shed no little glory on the Nation? Is not this tradition, too, a national heirloom? But the first-born daughter of Beauty no longer understands these simple truths. Infected by the spirit of American progress, she protests that the money spent on art is wasted; she is right willing that hundreds of millions be spent on the encouragement of the mechanical and iron industries.