strongest; for there God manifests, in however strange a guise. That
tide is nowhere stronger than in the railroad, which is the arterial
system of our civilization. All arteries lead to and from the heart,
and thus the railroad terminus becomes the beating heart at the center
of modern life. It is a true instinct therefore which prompts to
the making of the terminal building a very temple, a monument to
the conquest of space through the harnessing of the giant horses of
electricity and steam. This conquest must be celebrated on a scale
commensurate with its importance, and in obedience to this necessity
the Pennsylvania station raised its proud head amid the push-cart
architecture of that portion of New York in which it stands. It is not
therefore open to the criticism often passed upon it, that it is too
grand, but it is the wrong kind of grandeur. If there be truth in the
contention that the living needs of today cannot be grafted upon the
dead stump of any ancient grandeur, the futility of every attempt to
accomplish this impossible will somehow, somewhere, reveal itself to
the discerning eye. Let us seek out, in this building, the place of
this betrayal.

It is not necessarily in the main façade, though this is not a face,
but a mask--and a mask can, after its kind, always be made beautiful;
it is not in the nobly vaulted corridor, lined with shops--for all we
know the arcades of Imperial Rome were similarly lined; nor is it in
the splendid vestibule, leading into the magnificent waiting room, in
which a subject of the Cæsars would have felt more perfectly at home,
perhaps, than do we. But beyond this passenger concourse, where the
elevators and stairways descend to the tracks, necessity demanded the
construction of a great enclosure, supported only on slender columns
and far-flung trusses roofed with glass. Now latticed columns, steel
trusses, and wire glass are inventions of the modern world too useful