The fact is, we ignore the first great principle--the essence and _sine qua non_, of the art--DECORATED CONSTRUCTION. By construction is meant that mechanical arrangement of parts which is best suited to convenience and most conducive to stability. It is what the French would call the _motif_, the end in view, while decoration is only the means. And the moment we lose sight of it, in our anxiety to make room for some pet ornament, that very ornament becomes an eyesore, and will persist in spoiling the design, for the simple reason that the end is sacrificed to the means. Set it down, then, at the start, that ornament must be dependent upon construction, and not construction upon ornament. The useful begets the beautiful, and the order cannot be reversed. But before proceeding to what American architecture might be, we must, in all fairness, examine it as it is. Our great cities, of course, claim our attention first, for these centres of wealth and intellect must necessarily be centres of art, and there, if at all, are we to discover our prospects for a national style. As a single example of what it has attained to so far, nothing can be better suited to our purpose than Broadway, New York, our best-known and most essentially American thoroughfare. But what to compare it to we know not. Neither history nor geography affords a parallel. It resembles neither the London Strand nor the Parisian Boulevard, nor is it like the Ludwig Strasse of Munich, nor the Grand Canal of Venice; and yet it has something or other in common with all of these. There is all the incongruity of the English thoroughfare and the brilliancy of the French, while the frequent succession of vast palatial structures allies it still closer to the last-named examples. Perhaps, after all, the Grand Canal--the silent highway of the City of the Sea--is more like it in general effect than any other street in Europe. The one, it is true, is as straight as an airline, and the other nearly the shape of an S; the one a paved roadway, noisy with the rush of traffic, and, in the other, the water washing the very walls of palaces that are mournful and deserted--while, as regards style, there is scarcely a single specimen of the Venetian in this country. But the resemblance is this: your prevailing impression from first to last is the absence of all general arrangement, and the independent elegance of each separate facade. Each tells the same story: it is the wealth and enterprise of the citizen, and not the munificence of the sovereign, that has added palace to palace, and made the dumb stones eloquent. Remembering, then, that it is private taste and influence that is to develop our art, we proceed to the analysis of the great thoroughfare in question.