What is it that the thirty-one-story block is trying to say about us?  The thirty-one-story block is the masterpiece of mass, of immensity, of numbers; with its 2427 windows and its 779 offices, and its crowds of lives piled upon lives, it is expressing the one supreme and characteristic thing that is taking place in the era in which we live.  The city is the main fact that modern civilization stands for, and crowding is the logical architectural form of the city idea.  The thirty-one-story block is the statue of a crowd.  It stands for a spiritual fact, and it will never be beautiful until that fact is beautiful.  The only way to make the thirty-one-story block beautiful (the crowd expressed by the crowd) is to make the crowd beautiful.  The most artistic, the only artistic, thing the world can do next is to make the crowd beautiful.

The typical city blocks, with their garrets in the lower stories of the sky, were not possible in the ancient world, because steel had not been invented; and the invention of steel, which is not the least of our triumphs in the mechanical arts, is in many ways the most characteristic.  Steel is republican for stone.  Putting whole quarries into a single girder, it makes room for crowds; and what is more significant than this, inasmuch as the steel pillar is an invention that makes it possible to put floors up first, and build the walls around the floors, instead of putting the walls up first and supporting the floors upon the walls, as in the ancient world, it has come to pass that the modern world being the ancient world turned upside down, modern architecture is ancient architecture turned inside out, a symbol of many things.  The ancient world was a wall of individuals, supporting floor after floor and stage after stage of society, from the lowest to the highest; and it is a typical fact in this modern democratic world that it grows from the inside, and that it supports itself from the inside.  When the mass in the centre has been finished, an ornamental stone facing of great individuals will be built around it and supported by it, and the work will be considered done.

The modern spirit has much to boast of in its mechanical arts, and in its fine arts almost nothing, because the mechanical arts are studying what men are needing to-day, and the fine arts are studying what the Greeks needed three thousand years ago.  To be a real classic is, first, to be a contemporary of one’s own time; second, to be a contemporary of one’s own time so deeply and widely as to be a contemporary of all time.  The true Greek is a man who is doing with his own age what the Greeks did with theirs, bringing all ages to bear upon it, and interpreting it.  As long as the fine arts miss the fundamental principle of this present age—­the crowd principle, and the mechanical arts do not, the mechanical arts are bound to have their way with us.  And it were vastly better that they should.  Sincere and straightforward mechanical arts are not only more