The contrast between information and art in our books, and the tendency to stress information with a moral bent, are both thrown into sharper relief by the success of American architecture in expressing more and more a significant and lasting beauty. Nothing might seem at first more utilitarian than a building, and few things in our country seem less permanent, we have such a passion for altering. Yet art has made its greatest progress with us in architecture, and the stages of the progress have been accompanied by just such a selection and choice of subject as Aristotle’s remarks about character would imply. In our cities a genuine impulse toward beauty began to show itself two decades ago in shop-windows. Where else should beauty appear but in the enterprises we care most about? Since we were lovers of business, we began to indicate the beauty that business has in our eyes. The shop-window ceased to be, what in country hardware stores it still often is, a place where samples of all the merchandise were displayed, an order card from which you could plan your purchases; it became rather a scene of loveliness to contemplate for its own sake, an attraction to hold you rooted to the spot rather than a stimulus to hurry you inside to buy. Probably the shop-windows in our great streets could not be justified now on a purely economic basis; they have been lifted into the realm of beauty and are things to remember. But for this kind of shop-window not every article the store sells is “proper”, in the Aristotelian sense; nothing ridiculous is shown, though ridiculous things are bought and sold, nothing trivial is shown, and nothing that discloses too publicly the animal conditions in which we lead our spiritual life. With a different selection of articles which the store for our convenience must sell, we might have a comic window, the sight of which would cause us to smile at ourselves, or a satiric one, which would teach us to laugh at our fellowman.