with every physical need
luxuriously gratified. But these hotels nevertheless represent
democracy, it may be urged, for the reason that every one may there
buy board and lodging and mercenary service if he has the price. The
exceeding greatness of that price, however, makes of it a badge
of nobility which converts these democratic hostelries into feudal
castles, more inaccessible to the Long Denied than as though entered
by a drawbridge and surrounded by a moat.

We need not even glance at the churches, for the tides of our
spiritual life flow no longer in full volume through their portals;
neither may the colleges long detain us, for architecturally
considered they give forth a confusion of tongues which has its
analogue in the confusion of ideas in the collective academic head.

Is our search for some sign of democracy ended, and is it vain? No,
democracy exists in the secret heart of the people, all the people,
but it is a thing so new, so strange, so secret and sacred--the ideal
of brotherhood--that it is unmanifest yet in time and space. It is
a thing born not with the Declaration of Independence, but only
yesterday, with the call to a new crusade. The National Army is its
cradle, and it is nurtured wherever communities unite to serve the
sacred cause. Although menaced by the bloody sword of Imperialism in
Europe, it perhaps stands in no less danger from the secret poison
of graft and greed and treachery here at home. But it is a spiritual
birth, and therefore it cannot perish, but will live to write itself
on space in terms of beauty such as the world has never known.

II

DURING THE WAR

The best thing that can be said about our immediate architectural
past is that it is past, for it has contributed little of value to an
architecture of democracy. During that neo-feudal period the architect
prospered, having his place at the baronial table; but now poor Tom's
a-cold on a war-swept heath, with food only for reflection. This
is but natural; the architect, in so far as he is an artist, is a
purveyor of beauty; and the abnormal conditions inevitable to a state
of war are devastating to so feminine and tender a thing, even though
war be the very soil from which new beauty springs. With Mars in
mid-heaven how afflicted is the horoscope of all artists! The skilled
hand of the musician is put to coarser uses; the eye that learned
its lessons from the sunset must learn the trick of making invisible
warships