into granite deeps beyond range of vision, and mountains
of masonry with seas of labor in turmoil at their base, and
monumental spaces displaying the grimness of ordered power
slow-gathering through centuries. Of beauty there was nothing
to make appeal to him between those endless cliffs of stone
which walled out the sunrise and the sunset, the sky and the
wind.

The view of our pre-war architecture thus sketchily presented is sure
to be sharply challenged in certain quarters, but unfortunately for
us all this is no mere matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. The
buildings are there, open to observation; rooted to the spot, they
cannot run away. Like criminals "caught with the goods" they stand,
self-convicted, dirty with the soot of a thousand chimneys, heavy with
the spoils of vanished civilizations; graft and greed stare at us out
of their glazed windows--eyes behind which no soul can be discerned.
There are doubtless extenuating circumstances; they want to be clean,
they want to be honest, these "monsters of the mere market," but they
are nevertheless the unconscious victims of evils inherent in our
transitional social state.

Let us examine these strange creatures, doomed, it is hoped, to
extinction in favor of more intelligent and gracious forms of
life. They are big, powerful, "necessitous," and have therefore an
impressiveness, even an æsthetic appeal, not to be denied. So subtle
and sensitive an old-world consciousness as that of M. Paul Bourget
was set vibrating by them like a violin to the concussion of a
trip-hammer, and to the following tune:

The portals of the basements, usually arched as if crushed