the victims of his
pyrotechnic violence; and it is he who hits us in the eye.

This is the real case against that modern society that is symbolised by
such art and architecture. It is not that it is toppling, but that it is
top-heavy. It is not that it is vulgar, but rather that it is not
popular. In other words, the democratic ideal of countries like America,
while it is still generally sincere and sometimes intense, is at issue
with another tendency, an industrial progress which is of all things on
earth the most undemocratic. America is not alone in possessing the
industrialism, but she is alone in emphasising the ideal that strives
with industrialism. Industrial capitalism and ideal democracy are
everywhere in controversy; but perhaps only here are they in conflict.
France has a democratic ideal; but France is not industrial. England and
Germany are industrial; but England and Germany are not really
democratic. Of course when I speak here of industrialism I speak of
great industrial areas; there is, as will be noted later, another side
to all these countries; there is in America itself not only a great deal
of agricultural society, but a great deal of agricultural equality;
just as there are still peasants in Germany and may some day again be
peasants in England. But the point is that the ideal and its enemy the
reality are here crushed very close to each other in the high, narrow
city; and that the sky-scraper is truly named because its top, towering
in such insolence, is scraping the stars off the American sky, the very
heaven of the American spirit.

That seems to me the main outline of the whole problem. In the first
chapter of this book, I have emphasised the fact that equality is still
the ideal though no longer the reality of America. I should like to
conclude this one by emphasising the fact that the reality of modern
capitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even splendours that
might well stagger the wavering and impressionable modern spirit. Upon
the issue of that struggle depends the question of whether this new
great civilisation continues to exist, and even whether any one cares if
it exists or not. I have already used the parable of the American flag,
and the stars that stand for a multitudinous equality; I might here take
the opposite symbol of these artificial and terrestrial stars flaming on
the forehead of the commercial city; and note the peril of the last
illusion, which is that the ar