Frederic Remington wasn't any impressionist either; and so far as I can learn he didn't have a cubiform idea in stock. When Remington painted an Indian on a pony it was a regular Indian and a regular pony--not one of those cotton-batting things with fat legs that an impressionist slaps on to a canvas and labels a horse. You could smell the lathered sweat on the pony's hide and feel the dust of the dry prairie tickling your nostrils. You could see the slide of the horse's withers and watch the play of the naked Indian's arm muscles. I should like to enroll as a charter member of a league of Americans who believe that Frederic Remington and Howard Pyle were greater painters than any Old Master that ever turned out blistered saints and fly-blown cherubim. And if every one who secretly thinks the same way about it would only join in--of course they wouldn't, but if they would--we'd be strong enough to elect a president on a platform calling for a prohibitive tariff against the foreign-pauper-labor Old Masters of Europe. While we were about it our league could probably do something in the interests of sculpture. It is apparent to any fair-minded person that sculpture has been very much overdone in this country. It seems to us there should be a law against perpetuating any of our great men in marble or bronze or stone or amalgam fillings until after he has been dead a couple of hundred years, and by that time a fresh crop ought to be coming on and probably we shall have lost the desire to create such statues. A great man who cannot live in the affectionate and grateful memories of his fellow countrymen isn't liable to live if you put up statues of him; that, however, is not the main point. The artistic aspect is the thing to consider. So few of our great men have been really pretty to look at. Andrew Jackson made a considerable dent in the history of his period, but when it comes to beauty, there isn't a floor-walker in a department store anywhere that hasn't got him backed clear off the pedestal. In addition to that, the sort of clothes we've been wearing for the last century or so do not show up especially well in marble. Putting classical draperies on our departed solons has been tried, but carving a statesman with only a towel draped over him, like a Roman senator coming out of a Turkish bath, is a departure from the real facts and must be embarrassing to his shade. The greatest celebrities were ever the most modest of men. I'll bet the spirit of the Father of His Country blushes every time he flits over that statue of himself alongside the Capitol at Washington--the one showing him sitting in a bath cabinet with nothing on but a sheet.