Must Rhodes Fall? More Light on the Elimination of Politically Incorrect Statues.

For those less sophisticated than Father H, the belletrist was Max Beerbohm, and you can read the entire essay here on Project Gutenberg.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

Should statues be pulled down?  Of erstwhile slavers? Of British colonialists? Of Confederate generals?

There is a neat, possible resolution to this controversial modern dilemma in an essay (Mobled King, 1911) by an English belletrist ... I will not insult your perspicacity by spelling out his name. He was inspired by the haunting sight, in Italy, of a statue of King Umberto I which, once erected, had never been unveiled.

"I had hoped that by this essay I might rid my mind of him. He is inexcutible, confound him! ...

"In my young days, I wrote a plea that all the statues in the streets and squares of London should be extirpated and, according to their materials, smashed or melted down. From an aesthetic standpoint, I went a trifle too far: London has a few good statues. From a humane standpoint, my plea was all wrong. Let no violence be done to the effigies of the dead. There is no disrespect in setting up a dead man's effigy and then not unveiling it. But there would be no disrespect, and there would be no violence, if the bad statues familiar to London were ceremoniously veiled, and their inscribed pedestals left just as they are ...

"Let an inventory be taken of those statues. Let it be submitted to Lord Rosebery, and he be asked to tick off all those statesmen, poets, philosophers and other personages about whom he would wish to orate. Then let the list be passed on to other orators, until every statue on it shall have its particular spokesman. Then let the dates for the various veilings be appointed. If there be four or five veilings every week, I conceive that the whole list will be exhausted in two years or so. And my enjoyment of the reported speeches will not be the less keen because I can so well imagine them ...

"Not, however, because those speeches will so edify and soothe me, nor merely because those veiled statues will make less uncouth the city I was born in, do I feverishly thrust on you my proposition. The wish in me is that posterity shall be haunted by our dead heroes even as I am by Umberto. Rather hard on posterity? Well, the prevision of its plight would cheer me in mine immensely."