It was the fate of John P. Altgeld to be a storm center in his life. Now he becomes a post-mortem center. Large elements of the Chicago electorate still doubt the historic proportions of the Governor who pardoned the Haymarket bomb men. It is not to be wondered at if the proportions of the Borglum Altgeld annoy them. Nor is it surprising that the design, representing the Governor as the laboring people’s defender, gives offense to them. It is a safe wager that this element in the electorate is represented by the Municipal Art Commission. The issue is really not an art issue at all. In essence it is historic and political, or rather sociological. Altgeld’s keenness as a thinker and debater no one who ever heard him doubts. That he showed moral courage in that historic pardon, most of his enemies will concede. Our guess is that Borglum will succeed in immortalizing him as the friend of labor, though many obstacles may first have to be overcome. The surprising denouement was furnished by William H. (Big Bill) Thompson. He was then mayor and had made an appointment to discuss the matter with the Art Commission. They were waiting for him at the Art Institute where his messenger rather bluntly announced to them that the Commission was no longer in existence nor had any authority, its term of office having expired. “The statue looks good to me,” said the mayor, “and the committee doesn’t.” So the memorial was unveiled as scheduled on Labor Day, 1915, before an immense crowd including thousands of labor-union men and women. Governor Edward F. Dunne presided, and William Jennings Bryan delivered the speech of the day. The sculptor made a puzzled comment: I have been not a little surprised that in America, the foster mother of mankind, there exist no memorials of consequence dealing with the struggles and pathos of life. It is a matter of amazement and regret that Chicago, a city whose life has been crowned through sacrifice and struggle as it has been sweetened by suffering, should show antagonism to a memorial which develops or suggests a humane situation where one human being befriends another. There is something stern and vital behind this. But censorship, be it ever so official, will not arrest one beat in the natural heart of mankind, nor stop the natural expression of what is true, of what is good. And that which is true and good is, at least, a full sister of that which is beautiful. Millet’s “Angelus” and his “Man With a Hoe” would be subjects of supreme beauty and pathos in sculpture, admirably composed for public parks. How much more human and akin would be this interpretation of life than the cheap allegories or conventional vagaries which the unthinking call art.