Many years ago I heard a discussion in Germany among three art-teachers,--two of them with a world-wide fame,--that was as new to me as it was amazing. They seemed to agree that the art of the sculptor reached its height in the Age of Phidias; that never again would men give shape to figures fit to be put, let us say, beside the Elgin Marbles. As some nineteen centuries passed by, another art came to its finest flowering in the Italian Cinquecento, when Raphael, Da Vinci, and Michael Angelo added color to form. They agreed that never again would paintings be produced fit to be classed with the Sistine Madonna. Another two centuries passed, and the Bachs began the great music which these three modern artists thought of as the reigning art of our time. Here came their question, "What is to be the next and coming art that shall compare with the Greek period, with the Cinquecento, and with modern music?" One thought it would be the theatre. He wrote, I believe, a pamphlet to prove this. I do not recall the guess of either of the others; but I venture to make my own guess. Art is knowledge in its applications; and to apply our experience and our knowledge to the shaping of a higher social justice is also an art. It is an art already showing itself in the field of politics and social reconstruction; a politics, enriched and ennobled by ideals of citizenship, freed at last from that party machinery whose boss has been the puppet of business men fighting for monopoly privilege. It will be a politics not for the few or the favored; not alone for the strong and successful; but a politics for the common weal, for the common and inclusive good of every citizen according to his good will and honest endeavor. Here is a sphere for art as much nobler than that of sculptor or painter as the destinies of human life and society are higher than those of any inanimate object, even though carved by Phidias or painted by Raphael. It is, above all, an art that should touch by its inspiration the gallantry of the whole student class. The very breath of it is the shaping and directing of those conditions out of which may emerge a society in which the spirit of justice and equal opportunity will be realized at least so far that it will be no longer a mockery among honest men. The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS U. S. A End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship, by John Graham Brooks