Who built the beautiful
cities of the world but commercial men and commercial men only?
Genoa built by its traders, Florence by its bankers, and Venice,
most lovely of all, by its noble and honest merchants.
I do not wish you, remember, 'to build a new Pisa,' nor to bring
'the life or the decorations of the thirteenth century back again.'
'The circumstances with which you must surround your workmen are
those' of modern American life, 'because the designs you have now
to ask for from your workmen are such as will make modern' American
'life beautiful.' The art we want is the art based on all the
inventions of modern civilisation, and to suit all the needs of
nineteenth-century life.
Do you think, for instance, that we object to machinery? I tell
you we reverence it; we reverence it when it does its proper work,
when it relieves man from ignoble and soulless labour, not when it
seeks to do that which is valuable only when wrought by the hands
and hearts of men. Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it
is all bad and worthless and ugly. And let us not mistake the
means of civilisation for the end of civilisation; steam-engine,
telephone and the like, are all wonderful, but remember that their
value depends entirely on the noble uses we make of them, on the
noble spirit in which we employ them, not on the things themselves.
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