of a perfect piece of architecture (still so rare), will you not readily concede that where every edifice should be beautiful, and you never walked or drove out but through streets of palaces and artistic parks, the effect on the whole population of this ever-present beauty and grandeur, would be to refine, to expand, to elevate.  When we look at the architectural improvements made within a generation, in London, in Paris, in New York, we may, without being Utopians, hope for this transformation.  But the full consummation of such a hope can only be brought about in unison with improvements in all the conditions and relations of life, and the diffusion of such improvements among the masses.

It is to further-such diffusion that this Association has been founded.  Our purpose is to meet the growing demand for beauty in all things; to bring into closer cooperation the artisan and the artist; to make universally visible and active the harmony,—­I almost might say the identity,—­there is between the useful and the beautiful.

Gentlemen, ever in the heart of the practical, in the very core of the useful, there is enclosed a seed of beauty; and upon the fructification, growth, and expansion of that seed depends,—­aye, absolutely depends,—­the development of the practical.  But for the expansion of that seed, we should have neither the plough nor the printing-press, neither shoes nor the steam engine.  To that we owe silver forks as well as the electric telegraph.  In no province of work or human endeavor is improvement made, is improvement possible, but by the action of that noble faculty through which we are uplifted when standing before a masterpiece of Raphael.  This ceaseless seeking for a better, this unresting impulse towards the perfect, has brought the English race through a thousand years of gradual upward movement, from the narrow heptarchy, with its rude simplicity of life, up to this wide cultivated confederacy of states with its multiform opulence of life; and will yet carry us to a condition as much superior to our present as that is to the times of Alfred.

In the works of the Almighty this principle is so alive that they are radiant with beauty; and the degree of the radiance of each is often the measure of its usefulness.  How beautiful is a field of golden wheat—­whereby our bodies live—­and the more beautiful the closer it stands and the fuller are its heads.  The oak and the pine owe their majestic beauty to that which is the index of their usefulness, the solid magnitude of their trunks.  The proportions which give the horse his highest symmetry of form, give him his fleetness and endurance and strength.  And thus, too, with man,—­his works, when best, sparkle most with this fire of the beautiful.  We profit by history in proportion as it registers beautiful sayings and beautiful doings.  We profit one another in everyday life in proportion as our acts, the minor as well as the greater, are vitalized by this divine essence of beauty.  To