anite deeps beyond range of vision, and mountains
of masonry with seas of labor in turmoil at their base, and
monumental spaces displaying the grimness of ordered power
slow-gathering through centuries. Of beauty there was nothing
to make appeal to him between those endless cliffs of stone
which walled out the sunrise and the sunset, the sky and the
wind.

The view of our pre-war architecture thus sketchily presented is sure
to be sharply challenged in certain quarters, but unfortunately for
us all this is no mere matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. The
buildings are there, open to observation; rooted to the spot, they
cannot run away. Like criminals "caught with the goods" they stand,
self-convicted, dirty with the soot of a thousand chimneys, heavy with
the spoils of vanished civilizations; graft and greed stare at us out
of their glazed windows--eyes behind which no soul can be discerned.
There are doubtless extenuating circumstances; they want to be clean,
they want to be honest, these "monsters of the mere market," but they
are nevertheless the unconscious victims of evils inherent in our
transitional social state.

Let us examine these strange creatures, doomed, it is hoped, to
extinction in favor of more intelligent and gracious forms of
life. They are big, powerful, "necessitous," and have therefore an
impressiveness, even an aesthetic appeal, not to be denied. So subtle
and sensitive an old-world consciousness as that of M. Paul Bourget
was set vibrating by them like a violin to the concussion of a
trip-hammer, and to the following tune:

The portals of the basements, usually arched as if crushed
beneath the weight of the mountains which they support, look
like dens of a primitive race, continually receiving and
pouring forth a stream of people. You lift your eyes, and you
feel that up there behind the perpendicular wall, with
its innumerable windows, is a multitude coming and
going,--crowding the offices that perforate these cliffs of
brick and iron, dizzied with the speed of the elevators.
You divine, you feel the hot breath of speculation quivering
behind these windows. This it is which has fecundated these
thousands of square feet of earth, in order that from them may
spring up this appalling growth of business palaces, that hide
the sun from you and almost shut out the light of day.

"The simple power of necessity is t