The “man of moderate means,” so called, provides himself with no difficulty with a comfortable house, undistinguished but unpretentious, which fits him like a glove.  There is a piazza towards the street, a bay-window in the living room, a sleeping-porch for the children, and a box of a garage for the flivver in the bit of a back yard.

For the wage earner the housing problem is not so easily nor so successfully solved.  He is usually between the devil of the speculative builder and the deep sea of the predatory landlord, each intent upon taking from him the limit that the law allows and giving him as little as possible for his money.  Going down the scale of indigence we find an itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, or houses so abject that they are an insult to the very name of home.

[Illustration:  PLATE IV:  THE ERIE COUNTY SAVINGS BANK, BUFFALO, N.Y.]

It is an eloquent commentary upon our national attitude toward a most vital matter that in this feverish hustle to produce ships, airplanes, clothing and munitions on a vast scale, the housing of the workers was either overlooked entirely, or received eleventh-hour consideration, and only now, after a year of participation in the war, is it beginning to be adequately and officially dealt with—­how efficiently and intelligently remains to be seen.  The housing of the soldiers was another matter:  that necessity was plain and urgent, and the miracle has been accomplished, but except by indirection it has contributed nothing to the permanent housing problem.

Other aspects of our life which have found architectural expression fall neither in the commercial nor in the domestic category—­the great hotels, for example, which partake of the nature of both, and our passenger railway terminals, which partake of the nature of neither.  These latter deserve especial consideration in this connection, by reason of their important function.  The railway is of the very essence of the modern, even though (with what sublime unreason) Imperial Rome is written large over New York’s most magnificent portal.

Think not that in an age of unfaith mankind gives up the building of temples.  Temples inevitably arise where the tide of life flows 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.