that the specimens of it which he commends to your admiration are the work of architects of “Eastern” birth or training. Now, if not in Dickens’s time, the “man of Boston raisin’” is recognized in the West to have his uses. The question whether there is any American architecture is not yet so triumphantly answered that it is other than provincial to lay much stress on local differences. The general impression that the Eastern observer derives from Western architecture is the same that American architecture in general makes upon the European observer; and that is, that it is a very much emancipated architecture. Our architects are assuredly less trammelled by tradition than those of any older countries, and the architects of the West are even less trammelled than those of the East. Their characteristic buildings show this characteristic equally, whether they be good or bad. The towering commercial structures that are forced upon them by new conditions and [Illustration: DWELLINGS IN ST. PAUL. Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.] facilities are very seldom specimens of any historical style; and the best and the worst of these, the most and the least studied, are apt to be equally hard to classify. To be emancipated is not a merit; and to judge whether or not it is an advantage, one needs to examine the performances in which the emancipation is exhibited. “That a good man be ‘free,’ as we call it,” says Carlyle, in one of his most emphatic Jeremiads--“be permitted to unfold himself in works of goodness and nobleness--is surely a blessing to him, immense and indispensable; to him and to those about him. But that a bad man be ‘free’--permitted to unfold himself in _his_ particular way--is, contrariwise, the fatallest curse you could inflict upon him; curse, and nothing else, to him and all his neighbors.”