ten Chats_ is even more pertinent and pointed today than it
was some twenty years ago, when it was written. Speech that is full of
truth is timeless, and therefore prophetic. Mr. Sullivan forecast some
of the very evils by which we have been overtaken. He was able to do
this on account of the fundamental soundness of his point of view,
which finds expression in the following words: "Once you learn to look
upon architecture not merely as an art more or less well, or more or
less badly done, but as a _social manifestation_, the critical eye
becomes clairvoyant, and obscure, unnoted phenomena become illumined."

Looking, from this point of view, at the office buildings that the
then newly-realized possibilities of steel construction were sending
skyward along lower Broadway, in New York, Mr. Sullivan reads in them
a denial of democracy. To him they signify much more than they seem
to, or mean to; they are more than the betrayal of architectural
ignorance and mendacity, they are symptomatic of forces undermining
American life.

These buildings, as they increase in number, make this city
poorer, morally and spiritually; they drag it down and down
into the mire. This is not American civilization; it is the
rottenness of Gomorrah. This is not Democracy--it is savagery.
It shows the glutton hunt for the Dollar with no thought for
aught else under the sun or over the earth. It is decadence of
the spirit in its most revolting form; it is rottenness of
the heart and corruption of the mind. So truly does this
architecture reflect the causes which have brought it into
being. Such structures are _profoundly anti-social_, and as
such, they must be reckoned with. These buildings are not
architecture, but outlawry, and their authors criminals in the
true sense of the word. And such is the architecture of lower
New York--hopeless, degraded, and putrid in its pessimistic
denial of our art, and of our growing civilization--its
cynical contempt for all those qualities that real humans
value.

We have always been very glib about democracy; we have assumed that
this country was a democracy because we named it so. But now that
we are called upon to die for the idea, we find that we have never
realized it anywhere except perhaps in our secret hearts. In the life
of Abraham Lincoln, in the poetry of Walt Whitman, in the architecture
of Louis Sullivan, the spirit of democracy