kill in spinning, and weaving,
and picturing with the needle hangings to cover the bareness of the
home. This impulse grew with the centuries, until tapestries were a
natural art expression of different races of men, so that we have
Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch and English tapestries, each with
national tastes and characteristics of production. As time went on,
inevitable machinery undertook the task of making wall hangings, with
the whole-hearted help of all who had given their lives to art, and
tapestries had become a part of the riches of the world. When the
greater part of the world's wealth was in the possession of Popes and
Princes, it was usual to expend a goodly portion of it in works of art.
Pictures and tapestries and exquisitely wrought metal work, weavings and
embroideries, made priceless by costly materials and the thoughts and
labor of artists, were reckoned not as a sign of wealth but as actual
wealth. They were really riches, as much as stocks and bonds are riches
today. Such things were accumulated as anxiously and persistently as one
accumulates land or houses, or railroad bonds or stocks, and the buyer
was not poorer; but in fact he was richer for money expended in this
fashion. This everyday financial fact lay underneath and supported the
beautiful pageant of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gilding them
with a radiance which has attracted the admiration and excited the
wonder of all succeeding years.

That flower and culmination of labor which we call art was the capital
of those early centuries, and took the place of the Bank, the Bourse,
and the Exchange which later financial ideas have created.

It is in a great measure to this fact, as well as to the intense love
for, and appreciation of, art which distinguished this period, that we
owe the wonderful treasures which have enriched the later world. They
belong no longer to princes and prelates, but to governments and
museums, and are object lessons to the student and the artisan, and an
inheritance for both rich and poor of all mankind.

Except in the light of these treasures of art, it would be difficult to
understand how far-reaching and comprehensive was the greed of beauty
which possessed and distinguished the centers of tapestry production.
The museums of the world are made up of what remains of them. The
pictures and tapestries, the weavings and embroideries, the carvings and
metal work which the world is studying, belonged to the