in general characterize the architecture of our immediate past; an
architecture "without ancestry or hope of posterity," an architecture
devoid of coherence or conviction; willing to lie, willing to steal.
What impression such a city as Chicago or Pittsburgh might have made
upon some denizen of those cathedral-crowned feudal cities of the
past we do not know. He would certainly have been amazed at its giant
energy, and probably revolted at its grimy dreariness. We are wont
to pity the mediaeval man for the dirt he lived in, even while smoke
greys our sky and dirt permeates the very air we breathe: we think of
castles as grim and cathedrals as dim, but they were beautiful and gay
with color compared with the grim, dim canyons of our city streets.

Lafcadio Hearn, in _A Conservative_, has sketched for us, with a
sympathy truly clairvoyant, the impression made by the cities of the
West upon the consciousness of a young Japanese samurai educated under
a feudalism not unlike that of the Middle Ages, wherein was worship,
reverence, poetry, loyalty--however strangely compounded with the more
sinister products of the feudal state.

Larger than all anticipation the West appeared to him,--a
world of giants; and that which depresses even the boldest
Occidental who finds himself, without means or friends, alone
in a great city, must often have depressed the Oriental exile:
that vague uneasiness aroused by the sense of being invisible
to hurrying millions; by the ceaseless roar of traffic
drowning voices; by monstrosities of architecture without a
soul; by the dynamic display of wealth forcing mind and
hand, as mere cheap machinery, to the uttermost limits of
the possible. Perhaps he saw such cities as Doré saw London:
sullen majesty of arched glooms, and granite deeps opening