laimed in the Erie County Bank just across
the way. The massive rough stone walls of this building, its pointed
towers and many dormered chateau-like roof unconsciously symbolize the
attempt to impose upon the living present a moribund and alien
order. Democracy is thus afflicted, and the fact must needs find
architectural expression.

In the field of domestic architecture these dramatic contrasts are
less evident, less sharply marked. Domestic life varies little from
age to age; a cottage is a cottage the world over, and some manorial
mansion on the James River, built in Colonial days, remains a fitting
habitation (assuming the addition of electric lights and sanitary
plumbing) for one of our Captains of Industry, however little an
ancient tobacco warehouse would serve him as a place of business.
This fact is so well recognized that the finest type of modern country
house follows, in general, this or some other equally admirable model,
though it is amusing to note the millionaire's preference for a feudal
castle, a French chateau, or an Italian villa of the decadence.

The "man of moderate means," so called, provides himself with
no difficulty with a comfortable house, undistinguished but
unpretentious, which fits him like a glove. There is a piazza towards
the street, a bay-window in the living room, a sleeping-porch for the
children, and a box of a garage for the flivver in the bit of a back
yard.

For the wage earner the housing problem is not so easily nor
so successfully solved. He is usually between the devil of the
speculative builder and the deep sea of the predatory landlord, each
intent upon taking from him the limit that the law allows and giving
him as little as possible for his money. Going down the scale of
indigence we find an itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, or
houses so abject that they are an insult to the very name of home.

[Illustration: PLATE IV: THE ERIE COUNTY SAVINGS BANK, BUFFALO, N.Y.]

It is an eloquent commentary upon our national attitude toward a most
vital matter that in this feverish hustle to produce ships, airplanes,
clothing and munitions on a vast scale, the housing of the workers was
either overlooked entirely, or received eleventh-hour consideration,
and only now, after a year of participation in the war, is it
beginning to be adequately and officially dealt with--how efficiently
and intelligently remains to be seen. The housing of the soldiers was
another matter