are not likely to furnish good subjects for historical pictures; that "ideas" happen, unfortunately, to be, in Art, the principal things; and that a country which will not fight for its ideas is not likely to have anything worth painting. I have the honor to be, Sir, your faithful servant, J. RUSKIN. The Secretary of the Liverpool Institute. FOOTNOTES: [11] This letter was written in answer to a request that Mr. Ruskin would come and preside at the distribution of prizes among the students in the Science and Art Department of the Liverpool Institute, on Saturday, Oct. 31, 1863. It was subsequently read on the occasion of distribution, in accordance with the wish expressed towards the end of the letter. [12] See the preceding and the following letter. This one was, it will be seen, written in the year of the last great struggle of Poland against Russia. [13] A The expedition of the English and French against China was begun in the August of 1860; the war in Japan in the summer of 1863. [From "The Morning Post," July 7, 1864.] _THE POSITION OF DENMARK._ _To the Editor of_ "_The Morning Post_." SIR: Will you allow me, in fewest words, to say how deeply I concur in all that is said in that noble letter of Lord Townshend's published in your columns this morning--except only in its last sentence, "It is time to protest."[14] Alas! if protests were of any use, men with hearts and lips would have protested enough by this time. But they are of none, and can be of none. What true words are worth any man's utterance, while it is possible for such debates as last Monday's to be, and two English gentlemen can stand up before the English Commons to quote Virgil at each other, and round sentences, and show their fineness of wrist in their pretty little venomous carte and tierce of personality, while, even as they speak, the everlasting silence is wrapping the brave massacred Danes?[15] I do not know, never shall know, how this is possible. If a cannon shot carried off their usher's head, nay, carried off but his rod's head, at their room door, they would not round their sentences, I fancy, in asking where the shot came from; but because these infinite masses of advancing slaughter are a few hundred miles distant from them, they can speak their stage speeches out in content. Mr. Gladstone must go to places, it seems, before he can feel! Let him go to Alsen, as he went to Naples,[16] and quote Virgil to the Prussian army. The English mind, judging by your leaders, seems divided between the German-cannon nuisance and the Savoyard street-organ nuisance; but was there ever hurdy-gurdy like this dissonance of eternal talk?[17] The Savoyard at least grinds his handle one way, but these classical discords on the double pipe, like Mr. Kinglake's two tunes--past and present[18]--on Savoy and Denmark, need stricter police interference, it seems to me! The cession of