With great respect to the Minister of Works, I wish
he would appoint a small committee to consult with him about the disposition of London statues. The future of two of them, General Gordon and James II, is being unsatisfactorily—in the case of Gordon most unsatisfactorily—settled at this moment. About King James we perhaps need not worry much if he is established, as intended, in a bit of the National Gallery enclosure. But for the demand that he shall join his brother, Charles II, in the grounds of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea there is very little to be said. King James, as Duke of York, was Lord High Admiral, and (vide Pepys) rendered really great services to the Navy. His right place is somewhere near the Admiralty, and there would be no difficulty at all about finding a suitable site. The expulsion of Thornycroft's General Gordon from London is a much more serious matter, and to send him to Sandhurst because he was once at Woolwich seems a little inept. Gordon, with all his faults, was a great historic figure. That was why his statue was placed in Trafalgar Square. Now that its site is absorbed by the Jellicoe-Beatty memorial, it is absurd to suggest that it can be accommodated nowhere else in London.
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