“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the National Association of Builders,--You will not expect from me, in responding to this toast, any exhibition of that facetious spirit with which some of my predecessors have entertained you. It has, indeed, been said that American humor has never found full expression except in architecture. It has also been said by an honored friend of mine, himself an architect, whom I hoped to see here to-night, that American architecture was the art of covering one thing with another thing to imitate a third thing, which, if genuine, would not be desirable. But I hope you will agree with me that, though the expression is comic, the fact, so far as it is a fact, is serious even to sadness. It is a great pleasure and a great privilege for me to speak to this sentiment, and it is especially a privilege for me to speak upon it to an association of builders, because it seems to me that the real, radical defect of modern architecture in general, if not of American architecture in particular, is the estrangement between architecture and building--between the poetry and the prose, so to speak, of the art of building, which can never be disjoined without injury to both. If you look into any dictionary or into any cyclopædia under ‘architecture,’ you will find that it is the art of building; but I don’t think that you would arrive at that definition from an inspection of the streets of any modern city. I think, on the contrary, that if you were to scrape down to the face of the main wall of the buildings of these streets, you would find that you had simply removed all the architecture, and that you had left the buildings as good as ever; that is to say, the buildings in which the definition I have quoted is illustrated are in the minority, and the buildings of which I have just spoken are in the majority; and the more architectural pretensions the building has, the more apt it is to illustrate this defect of which I have spoken.