In our vast land the passion of nationality has become too much diffused. It has been broken into the narrower love bestowed upon a single State. It has been bruised by faction. It has been broken by anarchy. But within the walls of the Capitol, every State in the Union holds its memories, and garners its hopes. Every hall and corridor, every arch and alcove, every painting and marble is eloquent with the history of its past, and the prophecy of its future. The torch of revolution flamed in sight, yet never reached this beloved Capitol. Its unscathed walls are the trophies of victorious war; its dome is the crown of triumphant freemen; its unfilled niches and perpetually growing splendor foretell the grandeur of its final consummation. Remembering this, with what serious thought and care should this great national work progress: “The hand that rounded Peter’s dome, And groined the aisles of ancient Rome, Wrought with a sad sincerity.” Let no poor artist, no insincere spirit, assume to decorate a building in whose walls and ornaments a great nation will embody and perpetuate its most precious history. The brain that designs, the hand that executes for the CAPITOL, works not for to-day, but for all time. It was with a profound consciousness, not only of what this building is, but of all that it must yet be to the American people, that Charles Sumner, that profound lover of beauty, said, with so much feeling: “Surely this edifice, so beautiful and interesting, should not be opened to the rude experiment of untried talent. It ought not to receive, in the way of ornamentation, anything which is not a work of art.” In every future work added to the Capitol, let the significant words of Ruskin, the great art critic, be remembered: “There should not be a single ornament put upon a great civic building, without an intellectual intention. Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things to come. There is no action nor art whose majesty we may not measure by this test. Therefore, when we build a public building, let us think that we build it for ever. Let us remember that a time is to come when men will say: ‘See, this our fathers did for us.’ ”