THE CULT OF POSSESSION

Americans who are trying to keep Orville Wright from giving his first airplane to an English museum should let him do it. For the last twenty years England has been watching wealthy Americans carry off pictures, priceless manuscripts, even entire houses, because the British could not compete with the American rate of bidding. The Wright plane may form the nucleus of a collection of commercial masterpieces, and if the National Museum of Engineering, through its secretary, urges that it is distinctively American, and hence should remain here, the English can reply that then the products of Reynolds and Gainsborough do not belong in America.

Paintings, first-editions, and especially the manuscripts of authors are peculiarly the property of the country which produces them. They are the concrete expression of the best that the nation has done, and yet Americans with more money and collective instinct than respect for national possessions, make a clean sweep of these rarities, leaving Europe to console itself with second-bests.

If European art treasures were brought over here and placed at the disposal of students in public or semipublic museums and libraries, there might be some justification for the robbery of Europe. Instead, the Titians and Rembrandts go to private galleries, the Shakespeare folios go to the safes of book collectors. Now and then there is a great gift to the public, as in the Morgan Library and the Gardner Museum, but these are the exception, not the rule. Usually the public under stands through the newspapers that the great treasures of one collector have been auctioned off to make the galleries and libraries of other collectors still more distinguished.