unsightliness of the aid: better a crutch than a lost limb; and do this
tenderly, and reverently, and continually, and many a generation will
still be born and pass away beneath its shadow. Its evil day must come
at last; but let it come declaredly and openly, and let no dishonouring
and false substitute deprive it of the funeral offices of memory.

Of more wanton or ignorant ravage it is vain to speak; my words will
not reach those who commit them, and yet, be it heard or not, I must
not leave the truth unstated, that it is again no question of
expediency or feeling whether we shall preserve the buildings of past
times or not. _We have no right whatever to touch them_. They are not
ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the
generations of mankind who are to follow us. The dead have still their
right in them: that which they laboured for, the praise of achievement
or the expression of religious feeling, or whatsoever else it might be
which in those buildings they intended to be permanent, we have no
right to obliterate. What we have ourselves built, we are at liberty to
throw down; but what other men gave their strength and wealth and life
to accomplish, their right over does not pass away with their death;
still less is the right to the use of what they have left vested in us
only. It belongs to all their successors. It may hereafter be a subject
of sorrow, or a cause of injury, to millions, that we have consulted
our present convenience by casting down such buildings as we choose to
dispense with. That sorrow, that loss, we have no right to inflict. Did
the cathedral of Avranches[167] belong to the mob who destroyed it, any
more than it did to us, who walk in sorrow to and fro over its
foundation? Neither does any building whatever belong to those mobs who
do violence to it. For a mob it is, and must be always; it matters not
whether enraged, or in deliberate folly; whether countless, or sitting
in committees; the people who destroy anything causelessly are a mob,
and Architecture is always destroyed causelessly. A fair building is
necessarily worth the ground it stands upon, and will be so until
Central Africa and America shall have become as populous as Middlesex:
nor is any cause whatever valid as a ground for its destruction. If
ever valid, certainly not now, when the place both of the past and
future is too much usurped in our minds by the restless and
discontented present. The very qu