[...] the blame for avoidable damage may be put as fairly on the museum officer who was in charge of an object fifty or more years earlier as on the man who happens to be in charge when the damage becomes obvious. [...] It would be impossible to figure the cost of neglect against the cost of constant care and much protection but it does not take much imagination to see that consistent care will save money as well as the integrity of objects. The hitch is to get the program started. Either you start it or you join the procession of figures who left their troubles to the next fellow. [...] There may be those who still think that the care of a collection is only a matter of occasional repair. They call in a qualified expert at the last moment when a particular object is so sour in tone or so broken that they obviously cannot keep it on exhibition. Nobody who has taken the pains to study materials has the notion that extreme deterioration sets in suddenly like a disease in a living organism. It is the accumulation of a slow process of change. At a certain point that change is plain for everyone to see. It may have been going on for years and its progress could have been slowed or even stopped. [...] Conservation is merely the business of trying to prevent undue deterioration. This effort requires the best available knowledge of the true state of the thing that is subject to deterioration. [...] The average person probably gets no great lift to his spirits by making an imaginary jump forward two or three hundred years in time. If you can bring yourself to do that, however, and then look back, you may have to face the conclusion that you belong to the contemptible company called ‘they.’ You know, of course, that museum officers had a lot of troubles in 1949, but, in spite of those, you can’t get away from the impression that they might have done a good deal better about this business of long-range conservation (Stout 1949, 7-8).
