Some thirty odd years ago I expended a shilling on
a small volume, invaluable to amateur debaters, entitled Pros and Cons, designed to prime you with unanswerable arguments on which- ever side you chose of a number of controversial questions (unanswerable unless your opponent had a Pros and Cons too). One of them was whether the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece. Unfortunately I forget the details of the argumen- tation, but that matters little, as we are getting it all in the correspondence columns of The Times. Without any disrespect to the 7th Earl of Elgin, who brought the marbles from Greece —at a time when Greece was under Turkish rule and classic remains were being considerably imperilled by Turkish care- lessness about gunpowder—I am for returning the marbles. To say that more people can see them in Bloomsbury than on the Acropolis is neither here nor there. More people would see the Sphinx if it reposed on the Embankment by Cleopatra's Needle than see it where it is in the desert, but that does not justify a transfer. We have kept the marbles safe for Greece for over a century. Now let us offer to send them back when the war is over. The offer may not be accepted. In that case we should enjoy both the merit and the marbles too.
Previous page
