Tons of contemporaries of Lord Elgin called him a thief; Lord Byron being the most famous. And the result of trails are not objective truth. There's been tons

Tons of contemporaries of Lord Elgin called him a thief; Lord Byron being the most famous. And the result of trails are not objective truth. There's been tons of them where the outcome was considered unjust by any standard; there's even terms for this: "kangaroo court", "mismarriage of justice", "show trial", etc. And whether Elgin was or wasn't a "thief" is actually not very important; what is important is that in any modern reasonable context it would be considered theft and that it's actually not even a hard thing to correct this historical mistake.