30                                  Luther H. Evans

came from the author of the great story. There followed infor¬
mation about the purchaser to whom Dr. Rosenbach sold the
little morocco-bound book with its ruled pages, block letters,
and numerous pen-and-ink drawings.

In the leisure of my enforced idleness I began to think about
the aggressions which unusual riches had enabled Americans to
commit earlier in the century against the cultural patrimony of
other countries. I had only a few months earlier participated in
the exciting work of writing in London the constitution of the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organiza¬
tion, and was much attached to the noble ideals expressed in it.
One of these was respect for the cultural heritage of all countries,
and another was the jealous preservation of and making widely
available the world's books, manuscripts, art objects, and other
materials of learning and research. I had also seen some of the
evidence of the suffering which the people of the tight httle isle
had gone through. Reflection on these matters filled me with
emotion, and I determined to act, both to make some reparation
for excessive American acquisitiveness and to show gratitude for
the suffering from which we Americans had been beneficiaries.
But how?

Being an administrator, that is, an underpaid semi-intellectual
whose job it is to put other people's ideas into noiseless practice,
with care to obscure the fact if perchance an idea is his own, I
quickly came to the conclusion that the course of action I should
follow was to persuade a few compatriots to pay handsomely to
reliex'e my anguish by purchasing the manuscript at the forth¬
coming auction sale, and presenting it as a gift to the British
A'luseum, the most appropriate repository of the British cultural
heritage. The Museum's hunger of 18 years before no doubt
still existed.

As soon as it was safe to go downstairs to the telephone with¬
out danger of a relapse, I called Lessing Rosenwald, who had
recently contributed a magnificent collection to the Library of
Congress, and asked his advice. He accepted my idea with genuine