The true ideal of democracy--the rule of a people by the _demos_, or
group soul--is a thing unrealized. How then is it possible to consider
or discuss an architecture of democracy--the shadow of a shade? It is
not possible to do so with any degree of finality, but by an intention
of consciousness upon this juxtaposition of ideas--architecture and
democracy--signs of the times may yield new meanings, relations may
emerge between things apparently unrelated, and the future, always
existent in every present moment, may be evoked by that strange magic
which resides in the human mind.

Architecture, at its worst as at its best, reflects always a true
image of the thing that produced it; a building is revealing even
though it is false, just as the face of a liar tells the thing
his words endeavor to conceal. This being so, let us make such
architecture as is ours declare to us our true estate.

The architecture of the United States, from the period of the Civil
War, up to the beginning of the present crisis, everywhere reflects a
struggle to be free of a vicious and depraved form of feudalism,
grown strong under the very ægis of democracy. The qualities that made
feudalism endeared and enduring; qualities written in beauty on
the cathedral cities of mediaeval Europe--faith, worship,
loyalty, magnanimity--were either vanished or banished from this
pseudo-democratic, aridly scientific feudalism, leaving an inheritance
of strife and tyranny--a strife grown mean, a tyranny grown prudent,
but full of sinister power the weight of which we have by no means
ceased to feel.

Power, strangely mingled with timidity; ingenuity, frequently
misdirected; ugliness, the result of a false ideal of beauty--these