found utterance, and to
the extent that we ourselves partake of that spirit, it will find
utterance also in us. Mr. Sullivan is a "prophet of democracy" not
alone in his buildings but in his writings, and the prophetic note is
sounded even more clearly in his _What is Architecture? A Study in the
American People of Today_, than in _Kindergarten Chats_.

This essay was first printed in _The American Contractor_ of January
6, 1906, and afterwards issued in brochure form. The author starts
by tracing architecture to its root in the human mind: this physical
thing is the manifestation of a psychological state. As a man thinks,
so he is; he acts according to his thought, and if that act takes the
form of a building it is an emanation of his inmost life, and reveals
it.

Everything is there for us to read, to interpret; and this
we may do at our leisure. The building has not means of
locomotion, it cannot hide itself, it cannot get away. There
it is, and there it will stay--telling more truths about him
who made it, than he in his fatuity imagines; revealing his
mind and his heart exactly for what they are worth, not a whit
more, not a whit less; telling plainly the lies he thinks;
telling with almost cruel truthfulness his bad faith, his
feeble, wabbly mind, his impudence, his selfish egoism, his
mental irresponsibility, his apathy, his disdain for real
things--until at last the building says to us: "I am no more a
real building than the thing that made me is a real man!"

Language like this stings and burns, but it is just such as is
needful to shame us out of our comfortable apathy, to arouse us to
new responsibilities, new opportunities. Mr. Sullivan, awake among
the sleepers, drenches us with bucketfuls of cold, tonic, energizing
truth. The poppy and mandragora of the past, of Europe, poisons us,
but in this, our hour of battle, we must not be permitted to dream on.
He saw, from far back, that "we, as a people, not only have betrayed
each other, but have failed in that trust which the world spirit of
democracy placed in our hands, as we, a new people, emerged to fill
a new and spacious land." It has taken a world war to make us see the
situation as he saw it, and it is to us, a militant nation, and not
to the slothful civilians a decade ago, that Mr. Sullivan's stirring
message seems to be addressed.

The following quotation is his first crack of the whip at the
arch