ston Institute
of Technology, at Columbia College, and at Champagne, Illinois, with
well-trained and enthusiastic professors at the head of each, and
carefully-selected corps of assistants, is already doing much toward an
improvement in students themselves, and in raising the standard of
American architecture as a profession in the eyes of society. This
student-system must in time create a body of men, well educated,
enthusiastic, and bound together by an _esprit de corps_ hitherto almost
unknown among the great body of practising architects. The dictum passed
by such a body upon the art and science of building will be received
with respect by the laymen who employ them, and American architecture,
in its better phases, will receive an impetus and a nervous strength in
construction and composition which at present we find exemplified only
in the scattered works of a few highly-trained practitioners. So far we
have had in this country no fixed standard by which the educated
architect may be tried and his professional position established. Unlike
the practice of law and medicine, the field is free to all, and previous
training is not required. In France, where the educational probation is
long and severe and the rewards of success certain, the graduates of the
schools are few in number compared with the lists of new names
constantly appearing in the columns of our city directories with the
designation of "architect." In America, young men, ambitious and anxious
to succeed, after a few months spent in study and in copying drawings
in some prominent office, set up for themselves. They naturally drift
into the ranks of the Queen Anne designers, for the reason that their
art is "free," and they can jumble together

A patchwork of Japan,
And queer bits of Queen Anne,
All mixed upon the plan
Of as you like or as you can.

One of the most zealous of the English Queen Anne revivalists has made
the candid confession of the real weakness under the apparent strength
of the movement, in stating that "it is a bad style for students to cut
their teeth upon." If it is a bad foundation for the education of
students, certainly it must be bad for the stability and beauty of their
future works.

Nothing that I have seen so cleverly portrays the young and "high art"
architectural aspirant as the delineation of a character in a novel
published in England under the title of "The Ambassador Extraordinary,"
and said to have been writ