What is the deep-lying cause of this duplex and contemporaneous movement? Why has the old Christian civilisation of Europe felt itself in the last four centuries unable any longer either to contain itself within the ancient material limits or within the ancient ideal limits? Why, at the same moment as it advances to the conquest of new continents, does it destroy within itself all the ancient disciplinary restrictions? Because in these last centuries it has gradually discovered that the earth is much vaster and richer than it suspected; that it contains, in old Europe, as well as in young America, treasures in much greater abundance than it had ever pictured in its dreams; and that it can invent tools which bring these rapidly within its reach. Gradually, as man found that he could rob nature of her immense treasures, there arose and spread from generation to generation through all classes in Europe and America a craze for wealth and a mad ambition to win the mastery over nature, such as the world had never yet seen. To satisfy this craze and this ambition, however, it was necessary to break many of the innumerable bonds—religious, moral, æsthetic, and political,—which limited the energy and initiative of our forefathers. How could so many millions of men have brought themselves to emigrate to America, if the spirit of tradition had not been weakened in Europe, and if everybody had continued to hold, as they did once upon a time, that the greatest good fortune a man could have was that of being buried in the church in which he had been baptised? Even to-day there are those who lament the diminution, in all the Christian churches during the last few centuries, of the number, complexity, and rigour of the rites and ceremonies, just as others lament that the ceremonial of social life and etiquette is dying out. But would not men who are obliged to work, travel, and rush about as we do nowadays find themselves embarrassed beyond the point of endurance by a religion which made them spend too much time over rites, and by a complicated etiquette like that which still prevails in the states of the East, requiring a large part of the day to be spent in compliments and ceremonies? Europeans often laugh at the architecture of New York; and I must confess that I, too, found it distinctly bizarre. On the other hand, could that vast city have grown and renovated itself so rapidly in the last century, and have found accommodation for the countless multitudes which throng to it from all the corners of the world, if those who built it had troubled themselves to observe the rules formulated by the great architects of the sixteenth century, in the days when it took as much time to build a palace and a church as it now does to construct a city?