As a disguise for mean or thoughtless workmanship, the application of antique “style” was the romantic contribution to architecture; and it served very handily during the period of speculative building and selling that accompanied the growth of the new industrial towns. Even where style did not conceal commercial disingenuousness, it covered up a poverty of imagination in handling the elements of a building. Gothic touches about doors and the exterior of windows, and a heap of bric-a-brac and curios on the inside, softened the gauntness and bareness of this architecture, or rather, distracted attention from them. Curiosity was the dominant mood of the time, acquisitiveness its principal impulse, and comfort its end. Many good things doubtless came out of this situation; but architecture was not one of them. II Modern industrialism began to take root in America after the War of Independence, and its effect was twofold: it started up new villages which centered about the waterfall or the iron mine and had scarcely any other concern than industry; at the same time, by cutting canals which tapped the interior, it drew life away from the smaller provincial ports and concentrated commerce and population in great towns like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In New England, as in the English Cotswolds from Whitney to Chalford, the mechanical regime was humanized by the presence of an older civilization, and the first generation of factory hands were farmers’ lads and lasses who neither lost nor endangered their independence; but where the factory depended upon paupers or immigrants, as it did in the big towns and in some of the unsettled parts of the country, the community relapsed into a barbarism which affected the masters as well as the hands. There was more than a difference in literary taste between the Corinths and Bethels named by an earlier generation and the Mechanicsvilles that followed them. The chief watchwords of the time were progress and expansion. The first belonged to the pioneer in industry who opened up new areas for mechanical invention and applied science; the second, to the land pioneer; and between these two resourceful types the old ways, were they good or bad, were scrapped, and the new ways, were they good or bad, were adopted. Both land pioneering and industrial pioneering were essentially subdivisions of one occupation, mining; and, following the clue opened by Messrs. Geddes and Branford, one may say with Professor Adshead that the nineteenth century witnessed “the great attack of the miner on the peasant.”