Did ever so many elements of disintegration come together at one time and place before? The absence of tradition and example raised enough difficulties in Birmingham and Manchester and Lyons and Essen; but in America it was accentuated by the restless march of those pioneers who, in the words of a contemporary economist, “leave laws, education and the arts, all the essential elements of civilization, behind them.” What place could architecture fill in these squatter communities? It could diminish the hardships of living; it could grease the channels of gain; and it could demolish or “improve” so much of the old as it could not understand, as Bulfinch’s Court House in Newburyport was improved, and as many a fine city residence was swept away under the tide of traffic. These were the days when the log cabin flourished; but it did not remain long enough in place to become the well-wrought and decorative piece of rustic architecture that the better sort of peasant hut, done with the same materials, became in Russia. A genuine architectural development might have led from a crude log cabin to a finished one, from a bare cabin to an enriched and garnished one, and so, perhaps, in the course of a century or so, to a fine country architecture and a great native art of wood carving comparable to that of the Russian sculptors today. In America, however, the pioneer jumped baldly from log cabin to White House, or its genteel and scroll-sawed equivalent; and the arts inherent in good building never had a chance to develop. With the animus of the miner in back of everything the pioneer attempted, the pioneer’s architecture was all false-work and scantling. III