and
parks, planted with trees and flowers and freshened by streams and
fountains. And when you recall the agreeable, the elevating sensation
you have experienced in front of a perfect piece of architecture
(still so rare), will you not readily concede that where every edifice
should be beautiful, and you never walked or drove out but through
streets of palaces and artistic parks, the effect on the whole
population of this ever-present beauty and grandeur, would be to
refine, to expand, to elevate. When we look at the architectural
improvements made within a generation, in London, in Paris, in New
York, we may, without being Utopians, hope for this transformation.
But the full consummation of such a hope can only be brought about in
unison with improvements in all the conditions and relations of life,
and the diffusion of such improvements among the masses.

It is to further-such diffusion that this Association has been
founded. Our purpose is to meet the growing demand for beauty in all
things; to bring into closer cooperation the artisan and the artist;
to make universally visible and active the harmony,--I almost might
say the identity,--there is between the useful and the beautiful.

Gentlemen, ever in the heart of the practical, in the very core of the
useful, there is enclosed a seed of beauty; and upon the
fructification, growth, and expansion of that seed depends,--aye,
absolutely depends,--the development of the practical. But for the
expansion of that seed, we should have neither the plough nor the
printing-press, neither shoes nor the steam engine. To that we owe
silver forks as well as the electric telegraph. In no province of work
or human endeavor is improvement made, is improvement possible, but by
the action of that noble faculty through which we are uplifted when
standing before a masterpiece of Raphael. This ceaseless seeking for a
better, this unresting impulse towards the perfect, has brought the
English race through a thousand years of gradual upward movement, from
the narrow heptarchy, with its rude simplicity of life, up to this
wide cultivated confederacy of states with its multiform opulence of
life; and will yet carry us to a condition as much superior to our
present as that is to the times of Alfred.

In the works of the Almighty this principle is so alive that they are
radiant with beauty; and the degree of the radiance of each is often
the measure of its usefulness. How beautiful is a fie