The modern spirit has much to boast of in its mechanical arts, and in its fine arts almost nothing, because the mechanical arts are studying what men are needing to-day, and the fine arts are studying what the Greeks needed three thousand years ago. To be a real classic is, first, to be a contemporary of one's own time; second, to be a contemporary of one's own time so deeply and widely as to be a contemporary of all time. The true Greek is a man who is doing with his own age what the Greeks did with theirs, bringing all ages to bear upon it, and interpreting it. As long as the fine arts miss the fundamental principle of this present age--the crowd principle, and the mechanical arts do not, the mechanical arts are bound to have their way with us. And it were vastly better that they should. Sincere and straightforward mechanical arts are not only more beautiful than affected fine ones, but they are more to the point: they are the one sure sign we have of where we are going to be beautiful next. It is impossible to love the fine arts in the year 1913 without studying the mechanical ones; without finding one's self looking for artistic material in the things that people are using, and that they are obliged to use. The determining law of a thing of beauty being, in the nature of things, what it is for, the very essence of the classic attitude in a utilitarian age is to make the beautiful follow the useful and inspire the useful with its spirit. The fine art of the next thousand years shall be the transfiguring of the mechanical arts. The modern hotel, having been made necessary by great natural forces in modern life, and having been made possible by new mechanical arts, now puts itself forward as the next great opportunity of the fine arts. One of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future shall be the twentieth-century Parthenon--a Parthenon not of the great and of the few and of the gods, but of the great many, where, through mighty corridors, day and night, democracy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and lives and dies, streets rumbling below. The hotel--the crowd fireside--being more than any other one thing, perhaps, the thing that this civilization is about, the token of what it loves and of how it lives, is bound to be a masterpiece sooner or later that shall express democracy. The hotel rotunda, the parlour for multitudes, is bound to be made beautiful in ways we do not guess. Why should we guess? Multitudes have never wanted parlours before. The idea of a parlour has been to get out of a multitude. All the inevitable problems that come of having a whole city of families live in one house have yet to be solved by the fine arts as well as by the mechanical ones. We have barely begun. The time is bound to come when the radiator, the crowd's fireplace-in-a-pipe, shall be made beautiful; and when the electric light shall be taught the secret of the candle; and when the especial problem of modern