Shortly before I last left Albany I chanced to remark to my associates that if I were a member of your Committee I did not believe that with every desire to be fair and candid and thorough I should have been able to keep my mind free from impressions and sentiments more or less prejudicial to a just conclusion. I added that if I were to have an opportunity to speak with you I should be disposed before taking up the technical question with which you are laboring to ask you to try to understand a little better than it is likely that you do for what we are accountable in this business, and how we have come to be accountable for it. More importance seems to have been attached to this remark than I desired or intended and it has thus turned out that something like an engagment has been made with you in my behalf. Distrusting my readiness to say what I had vaguely in mind as desireable to be said by way of introduction to more essential matters I have attempted, necessarily very hastily in the short time at my disposal, to give it consistency in the paper from which I read.

We who today are first permitted to address you have had as you know for nearly two years past a definite professional duty as the advisers of the State in regard to a building in the construction of which it is engaged. We have been regularly retained and are in the pay of the State for this service.

The occasion for the special inquiry which your Committee has been instructed to make arises from the fact that a number of our professional bretheren not so retained and without invitation from the state have taken it upon themselves to advise that our counsel to it should be rejected. They have also procured and caused to be laid before you a series of papers from numerous other gentlemen which altogether are adapted to convey the idea, are in [289] part at least designed to convey the idea, and without other information must irresistably give you the idea, that we have committed a grave professional offence—an offence—if I should not rather say a crime, which has profoundly shocked the sensibilities of the whole body of architects of the country; that the profession has risen to repudiate us and to warn the state, our employer, that as architects we are unworthy of its respect or confidence.

The state is told for example, (I quote from documents of which two editions have been officially published and which have been industriously disseminated) that the advice we have given it is ridiculed by all competent critics, that its errors are unpardonable; that it is in direct antagonism to all received rules of Art, that its adoption would for ages vitiate the public taste, that it would result in a monstrosity, in a horrid nightmare, in an absurdity so glaring as to require no criticism, and so on.

If it were possible for you to receive these representations literally as the unprejudiced opinions of the architects of the country, you must have been inclined to doubt if the debasement of politics could reach a lower depth than that marked by the state’s employment for such a duty of charlatans so base and so brazen as those before you.

But you well know that no such deduction is possible to be entertained by any well informed man.

Look at it.

My friend Mr Richardson here is no stripling and yet had you questioned the gentlemen who have been before you on the subject they would not have been able to name one other man who in the same period of practice has obtained a more generally recognized, more assured or more brilliant professional success. Only last week, some of these very gentlemen, fresh from giving their evidence before you here in Albany, came to greet him with warm congratulations upon the last illustration of this success, and I believe that there is an unusual concurrence of opinion that his success is fair, legitimate & well deserved.

Mr Eidlitz again could point you to more than 30 churches and other edifices of public importance which he has built in our land and it may be doubted if any other active architect can show as many which have been found equally acceptable to men of acknowleged taste. Mr Eidlitz is old enough to have had an honored name among the architects of the state before a majority of those who now caution the State against him had drawn their first shop fronts.

Your Committee very well knows, Sir, that my associates are the peers of the best architects of the country. There are none better-grounded in the principles of Art, none better able to guide the state by those principles, none better schooled or better equipped for the duties the state has asked them to assume. Two years ago not one of these gentlemen now trooping to the attack upon them would have failed had you made the inquiry to confirm this estimate of them.

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Suppose if you please Sir, that these men, my associates, are men of very bad private character, low lived, dissolute, malicious and thoroughly dishonest. Still they must be recognized as artists—unquestionably they have an established standing as artists, and that implies a great deal. It implies for a selfish and base man that his selfishness and his baseness are applied to means of indulging his artistic propensity. It does not mean and it is wholly inconsistent with the idea that he is utterly indifferent to the requirements of art, to the conditions of beauty and that whenever it serves to put money in his pocket he snaps his finger at these requirements. As for the third member of our partnership I may be allowed to say for him that if he has a reputation for lightly accepting public trusts or of acquitting himself of them ignorantly, recklessly or faithlessly, it is one of quite recent growth.

Take us at any measure you please, are we men, Sir, who are likely either ignorantly or carelessly or with deliberate sinfulness to have committed an offence against our art which in itself would give reasonable occasion for such an outcry as you have heard from these gentlemen.

If you can imagine for an instant that I have been the marplot of this business, ask whether such men as my associates are likely to have been drawn into a grave professional crime by a man who deems himself unworthy to uphold alone the title of Architect.

Before the opinion was given which has been made the occasion of so much reproach to us, we had been eight months engaged in the investigation and discussion of the matters dealt with. We had had more than fifty meetings for debateing it. Our opinion was finally expressed in a methodical way and with argumnt and illustration as carefully as possible freed from all technical obscurity. How was it on the other side?

The gentlemen who took it upon themselves to come between us and our employer, ostensibly formed the judgmnts which have been given you mainly upon a newspaper publication of two drawings taken from among those furnished the Commission. These drawings had not been presented by us as complete; they had not been presented by us as designs which we should unqualifiedly recommend to be adopted. Their publication was not made at our request or at our instigation. Not one of the gentlemen had seen the drawings or fully knew the advice which we had given the Commission. Nevertheless their action was plainly concerted and systematic. It seems to have been to some extent prearranged and prepared for. With such pretext upon such appearance of an occasion as the publication of these drawings afforded, their protests began at once to pour in upon the legislature from different parts of the country far and near.

Were you previously aware that the architects of the country had their eyes fixed on the Capitol of New York, that they watched it with such eager interest? Do you know of another case in which architects have hurried up from all parts of the country to protest against an act of vandalism? There are hundreds of stately buildings in the World, in which one style in architecture has [291] been placed over another. Did it ever occur before that there was a general uprising of architects to arrest the progress of such an atrocity?

You know perfectly well Sir, that the whole story has not been told—that however sincere these gentlemen were in what they said they had been moved to say it by some other consideration, some other purpose, than that which is plainly expressed in their memorial & their letters.

It must be plain to you Sir, if you look it all over, that this demonstration is a demonstration not as these gentlemen imagined it to be simply of architectural orthodoxy but of architectural partisanship.

But what was the impulse from which this partisanship proceeded; what {was} its motive, bent and aim?

Had it grown out of a cooperative devotion to purity of style? I question Sir if there are any architects who are more given to mixing styles than some of the gentlemen who have been most zealous in this matter.

It has been suggested that they are chiefly men who are accustomed to work in the renaissance style and that they have felt that the proposition to depart from the customs of the renaissance in the treatmnt of the Capitol was equivalent to a condemnation of that style for any and all purposes and consequently a condemnation of themselves and their work, a condemnation which they were bound to resist and resent.

Illogical and inconsequent, this explanation cannot account to you for all the feeling that has been manifested.

I ask you then to look with me a little further.

First, you will please to observe that except in our official reports and in answer to pertinent and respectful inquiries, we of the Advisory Board have been perfectly silent as to how we came to be in the affair, on what terms; with what understanding; with what views and intentions; how we have managed our business, what has been one man’s part & what anothers. Of all that you are ignorant; the public is ignorant, and these architects are and have been all the time utterly in the dark.

Now Sir, you know that in affairs where large public interests are inextricably mixed with diverse private interests, (and when their direction in whole or in essential parts is likely to affect for better or worse personal fortunes and personal reputation) you know how it is that doubts and suspicions spring up like weeds and how it is also that from these doubts and suspicions, conjectures, surmises, suppositions and guesses develop, and yet again you know how surely many of these creeping branches break out into positive rumors and reports and presently there is a crop of what pass current for authentic facts. And you know how it is that no self respecting man unfavorably affected by these poor fruits of an unhealthy imagination is ever inclined to lay aside his proper work and set about killing them. And you know how little use it would be if he were. For after all, the roots of suspicion and doubt and distrust are below the surface and if you cut off one sprout from them a dozen may presently rise in its place. A man has nothing to do as a general rule but [292] live them down. And yet you know that these miserable weeds are sometimes factors in personal and in political history of no trifling importance. Every member of the Committee probably knows that there are men whose minds are in some degree poisoned against himself through the gradually accumulating effect of observations such as are contained in a single obscure line of the local items of a newspaper, which by itself it would be absurd to contradict or in any way take any notice of.

And every member knows that there is no place in the world, where a soil is found so rich, deep, warm and fructifying to these often utterly ridiculous but nonetheless very noxious plants as that in which this Capitol stands. Few men have suffered more in this way and we are in some respects prepared to testify that few men have suffered more unjustly in this respect than some here present and not I regret to say of our side.

Let the members of your Committee take all the circumstances into consideration and ask themselves whether it is likely that we of the Advisory Board have suffered not at all—in like manner, and whether it is not possible—that a more or less ill defined distrust of us, otherwise than as artists has arisen here and has been propagated and extended its growth so at last to strike its roots into the mind of some of our professional bretheren?

Let us suppose that a possibility appears rising to them that a custom is to be disregarded in an instance which will be prominent and notorious; which custom is so necessary to be observed for the interests of the profession that it has with them more than the sacredness of a law—the custom I mean which requires that the designer of a building shall, whenever his design is used, be allowed to earn the fees of supervising its construction.

Starting with a clue of this kind, and remembering that architects have much the same human nature with men of other callings, look, if it please you, for a moment at certain facts which are well known to you and see if you can trace no connection between them and the sudden outburst witnessed last year of professional interest in this building.

Mr. Thomas Fuller comes here, a worthy gentleman from Canada and engages in a competition for the position of architect of the new Capitol. He is not at once successful but as the final result of a series of arrangments, compromises, combinations and of partnerships with rivals, such as the questionable custom of professional competitions often compels architects to resort to as the necessary condition of success, he at length works his way to the place. He holds it for a series of years. In the language of the profession the Capitol has become his building, his right to it is unquestioned. But at length the Capitol comes under the management of men of whom he knows little except that they are chosen of the party which has thrown out those who have hitherto kept him where he is and who have given him their confidence. One day the head of this new Commission suddenly walks into Mr Fuller’s office bringing three strangers who he states have been employed by the Commission [293] to assist it in an examination of his building and of his plans with a view to some contemplated changes and improvements.

Suppose this to occur to a man, who however thoroughly a gentleman, disposed to credit others as far as possible with good and honorable motives, had been living for ten years in the noisome atmosphere of suspicion, rumor, gossip, slander and detraction which so often hangs about this Capitol, suppose an English gentleman whose first and only experience of republican life had been in this atmosphere and who had for ten years been schooling himself to carry on his work under such tortures as it supplies to any man of refinemnt. How, I ask you, would he be likely to regard these intruders and what would he be likely to imagine as to the motives and ultimate objects of their appointment?

It is not fair to speak in this way of Mr Fuller and leave it unsaid for a single moment that in the very difficult position in which he was placed toward us he bore himself with entire dignity and courtesy and that in this particular he gained and he holds our hearty respect. We have a difference with him and we necessarily stand here his opponents but our difference is purely a difference of judgemnt. Placing ourselves however in his position, with his slight knowledge of us and with such knowledge and impressions as he was likely to have obtained of the Chairman of the new Commission and of the manner in which Americans carry on their public business, can we suppose that he took a wholly favorable view of our position; of our motives, purposes and intentions?

What were his friends and allies here and elsewhere likely to imagine? from such rumors of the occurrence as would naturally come to them.

Is there a man here, not of ourselves who is at this moment completely free from a suspicion that we were intending, and expecting to open a way to get into such a position as that we now hold; to supercede Mr Fuller as the Architects of the building, and that there was an understanding to that effect; some sort of a plot to bring it about between us and the new Capitol Commission?

Are there not men here now who think that they see how the thing managed, how the pipes were laid and the whole business glossed over with the intention—they would have it the vain intention—to avoid raising the indignation of the public? Are there not men here who have talked and written of the new Capitol ring as if something notorious.

Is it to be imagined that the idea occurred to no one until quite lately that Mr Fuller was liable to be made the victim of a dirty political intrigue. Or that from no one to whom it may have occurred was it possible that that mysterious phenomenon called an authentic rumor should emanate and spread? That no man to whom such a rumor should come would be capable of feeling shame as an American that this English gentleman coming here at the expense of the State should be so threatened? Is it impossible that the good [294] judgmnt of more than one such indignant person might be carried away and run him into rash and extravagant courses before he had severely questioned just how much basis of fact such a rumor might have? Do you see no provocation to partisanship in these circumstances? Would it not be rather creditable than otherwise to Mr Fuller’s friends here in Albany and elsewhere that they had some feeling in the matter and that they sought to propogate that feeling?

We know Sir that they did use means adapted to that end.

I spoke just now of Mr Fuller’s allies—You know that he was at that time at the head of a Society of Architects here in Albany and that that Society was in affiliation and in correspondence with other societies of architects in New York and other cities. Possibly you may not know that every man among those who came so promptly forward to protest to the legislature against the change of styles was a member of one of those societies.

I say Sir that we know that means were used adapted to the end of firing the hearts of these our professional bretheren; that there was a certain amount if you please of waving of the bloody shirt. We know, for example, that our professional bretheren were informed that on a given date we were all here in Albany lobbying with the legislature, that articles published at the time in the newspapers were attributed to us and that false statemnts in them discreditable to Mr Fuller, phrases in them unkind and ungenerous to Mr Fuller were quoted and passed around as proceeding from us. We know that a circular letter was sent out asking the cooperation of Architects’ in other cities in the rescueing movemnt and we know that while this appeal struck some as highly improper, undecorous and unprofessional, the hearts of others were fired by it to the utterance of such professional advice as you have heard. All this we know Sir, not through any search we have made for such knowledge but through the voluntary statemnts of certain cooler heads of the profession who have thought it better that we should be advised of it.

It was all well intentioned Sir, all prompted by chivalric feeling, all creditable to the hearts of all concerned.

But whether it was throughly just and sound and based on a true knowledge of the facts & whether the indignation expressed was wholly representative of a settled well considered professional judgmnt upon the matter of styles, that we do not know. Whether on the whole it is a good, prudent, and always trustworthy method to introduce for guarding against abuses of the Civil service of the state and whether as such it is desirable to be encouraged, it is for you and not for us to consider.

Upon the point of prudence and safety, perhaps it may be best to mention that every one of the rumors about ourselves to which I have referred and doubtless many others, were purely offsprings of the imagination.

We had not, for instance, written or caused to be written a single word for the newspapers. The publication more particularly referred to had been made without our knowledge or consent & was very disagreeable to us. We [295] had never spoken to a member of the legislature on the subject of the Capitol except when he had introduced it and desired information upon it; there was not a word of truth in any reports of our doings by which we were made to appear as taking our steps in this matter beyond the strict line of the requiremnts of our official and what we believed to be our professional obligations.

Whether we were right in our view of our professional obligations and in accepting the official obligations that we did, is another matter. That you might, if you should come to do so, better judge us in this respect I should like, if I could count on your interest, to give a full and detailed narrative of our connection with this business and to make known to you all that we know; but as that is out of the question I will say that if there remains a lurking suspicion with anyone that there is anything in it which we would wish to keep out of the light, I shall take as a favor if he will now or at any other time question me about it.

But I propose to tell you if you will permit me here & now how our connection with it began. To reveal the very inception of the plot in all desirable detail.

In June 1875, I was travelling Eastward on the Central RRoad and found Mr Dorsheimer, the Lt Governor on the train. He asked me to sit with him and began almost at once to speak of the Capitol. He told me of the action of the legislature making the new commission; of his position upon it; and of his great regret that he was upon it. He said that there was great public dissatisfaction with the building and that after as careful an examination of it as he had been able to make it appeared to him that there were abundant grounds for it. He expressed a strong repugnance to the association of his name with such a work but said that the law was such that he could not now escape the responsibility. He did not know much of Mr Fuller, he believed that the parliament houses at Ottawa were respectable buildings and if Mr Fuller had really designed them of which he appeared to harbor a doubt he ought to be able to do better work than he had done in the state capitol, as far as that was concerned it seemed to him to be thoroughly bad and he greatly distrusted his ability. He then undertook to explain to me what he regarded as the more prominent faults of the building and to discuss with me the possibility of getting the better of some of them. This conversation—or rather this discourse for I took little part in it—lasted for several hours and it certainly impressed me strongly with the conviction that Mr Dorsheimer’s mind was much burdened and perplexed with the matter. At length, when we had nearly reached Albany he observed that the Commission was expected to have ready for the next session of the legislature plans for the completion of the building which should have received the unqualified approval in all respects of the Commission & that this approval was to be binding so that thereafter no alteration could be made without the written consent approval of all the Commissioners. Mr Dorsheimer went on to say that the plans to be made by Mr Fuller would be very numerous, that they could not be completed much before [296] the opening of the session, that they were then to be passed under review by the Commission, that neither he nor either of his associates had the technical knowledge, experience or training, nor would they have the time to give the plans when Mr Fuller should have them ready such critical examination as they ought to receive, that only an expert could adequately judge them and that of course they could not ask Mr Fuller’s assistance in criticising his own plans. Moreover, he added, he felt sure from what he had seen of Mr Fuller’s work that there would at least be parts of them which they could not fully approve—and if not, he asked, how would it be possible to comply with the requirments of the legislature to report complete plans fully approved? He did not see but that they were at Mr Fuller’s mercy. Did not see but that the state would be compelled next year to build exactly as Mr Fuller should propose, or not build at all.

Finally he said that the only way to meet the difficulties of the case that had occurred to him was to get the aid of a Board of experts, and he asked if I did not think that would be a practicable and proper thing to do?

I answered that I believed that the custom had been established in England and that the Institute of Architects had I thought recommended its adoption here, that when laymen were required to pass upon architectural plans of special importance, as in the case of the compilation drawing for the Courts of Law in London that they should take counsel with an architect. It would be a sort of duty, that of passing judgment on the work of another, that no respectable architect would court, I added, but I supposed that it would be a perfectly proper one and one which if called upon by the state no architect would be justified in refusing.

"Well”, said he, "if we conclude to adopt that course I shall call upon you.”

"But I am not an architect.”

"You are a member of an architectural firm are you not?” he asked.

"I have been”, I replied, "but nonetheless I never have offered my services to the public as an architect.”

"Its no matter”, he said; "what we need is a complete Board of Experts, and you are an expert in the administration and managemnt of public works which include architectural works” and there the matter ended for the time.

This conversation occurred nearly two years ago, and it is not to be supposed that I now recall it literally or in its exact sequence—but I do so as nearly as I can & I am sure that substantially what I have said then passed between us. I did not regard the part personal to myself as necessarily serious.

Some little time after this Mr Dorsheimer asked Mr Richardson and me to meet him in Albany, and I learned that Mr Richardson had had a conversation very similar to mine with him. Mr Richardson and I talked of the matter and we agreed in taking much the same view of it that I have just now expressed.

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I ought to mention perhaps that Mr Dorsheimer had had some previous experience in dealing with both Mr Richardson and myself in a professional capacity. This had come to him as a Commissioner of public works on which we were employed.

After some debate with the Lieutt Governor, being urged by him first as a personal favor to himself and secondly as a matter of duty to the State, we consented to serve as he wished. We were then consulted as {to} an additional member or members of the proposed board. Seven architects and two engineers, were named. The Lieut Governor observed that no engineer was likely to be needed and after thoroughly canvassing the architects, refering in the case of most to such of their works as he had seen, selected Mr Eidlitz distinctly on the ground of his large experience and the general satisfaction he had himself experienced with many of his important works, and on no other.

He finally said that he would propose that we should receive a round sum of $1500 each for the service—he understood that it would be inadequate but he did not think the Commission would consent to making it larger.

To this we made no reply but met with him before the Board where the arrangment was confirmed.

I wrote to Mr Eidlitz and he joined us. Immediately upon his coming into the room where we were, he said, "So far as I understand what would be expected, the duty of this proposed board would be one of the most disagreeable that an architect could be called upon to perform, and, of course, $1500 would be no compensation for it but I considered when I received your note that you were not a man to blunder into such a business or who would propose to me that I should join you in it unless you thought that by doing so we might be in the way of rendering the state some service.”

Much in these words if not literally, and in this spirit we all of us accepted the duty of our office and in this spirit we pursued it. It may better show you this if! say that there is not one of us who has not at different times, when certain stages of our task have been passed asked of his associates if they would not consent to his retirement. I have myself been most particularly anxious to withdraw, and have been prevailed on to remain only by the declaration of both my comrads that if I refused they would themselves immediately resign. Of course this was before the attacks made upon us, or after they ceased and when we had no idea that they would be renewed.

There are two things more, Sir, of which I wish, if you please, to speak—because they seem to have been misunderstood. First, as to our attitude toward Mr Fuller.

To explain this it may be necessary that I should say that there is a custom which seems fixed in this country, a custom to which our people are tenaciously attached, but which every competent architect believes to be a bad one; at least a very questionable one. I mean the custom of obtaining plans and selecting the architects for public buildings by a certain method of public competition. The method adopted in the case of this Capitol building was [298] not one, as architects believe, which was calculated to obtain for the state such plans as it should have had or all such architectural service as it needed. The custom is based as we think on a wrong idea of the proper duties of the architect and of the most desirable relations between an architect and his client. No man who has ever been for his private ends in proper relations with a good architect can need to be informed what these are. The architect should not stand in the position of a mere scrivener, clerk or amanuensis to his client, but in the confidential position of his lawyer or physician. He should not merely follow, in many important respects he should lead. He should not be instructed only, in many important respects he should instruct.

The usual process I say is based on a mistaken view of the responsibilities of the architect and a most exceedingly mistaken under estimate of what may properly and what should be asked of him. And this mistaken view having been adopted at the outset is thereafter almost unavoidably maintained, and the architect selected in this manner never comes into his proper position, never feels his proper responsibilities, is never able to fully give his client that benefit which he should have of his knowledge, training, experience and art. I wish that this could be realized but there seems to be a difficulty about {it} where an architect is concerned.

A man needing medical treatment would do a very foolish thing, as anyone can see, if he should undertake to describe his own symptoms and advertise that he would receive prescriptions for them and choose that man for a physician whose prescription he liked best. A man would make grave mistakes who in like manner selected his lawyers, and in like manner had his contracts drawn.

When a building plan is the result of such a process as public opinion is supposed to require to be followed generally with our public buildings, architects are not surprised to find crudities in it, evidences of inexperience and imperfect study in many respects.

We explained this to the Commission; we explained more than once or twice, we explained many times that Mr Fuller was not necessarily responsible for many things which under the constant searching inquiries of the Commission we were obliged to speak ill of in the building, and here I may testify that no man on trial for his life before a French justice was ever more shrewdly and persistently examined & cross examined and obliged to show himself from every point of view than we have been in the Commission’s process of examining this building through our eyes and our minds.

But the Committee should distinctly understand that we were never asked, certainly we never undertook, to pass judgment on the Architect of the Capitol, or to pass judgment on the Commission which had been superceded. We were asked to give expert opinions upon the building as we found it, on the plans as we found them, and on the best available means of bettering them and of bettering it. After a time—it was no part of our original undertaking,—we [299] were asked to prepare plans in accordance with the advice we had given.

The only advice we have ever given the Commissioners or any of them with respect to Mr Fuller was that they should not hold him accountable for all the faults of the building and that they should not think of dismissing him.

On one occasion I remember that in answer to some observations of ours the Lieut Governor said, "If you can satisfy us that Mr Fuller is not responsible for these faults—if you can satisfy us that he is throughly competent for the work—understand that we have no prejudice against him, on the contrary we would like nothing better than to strengthen him and sustain him and give him a chance to show the very best that he can do.”

I don’t mean to be understood as intimating that at the time Mr Fuller was dismissed, after all that had then occurred it was not right and necessary that he should be dismissed. But that was not a part of our business and there was never an effort to make it so. Until after Mr Fuller’s dismissal we had no knowledge of any intention to dismiss him.

I am not conscious of ever having said a word of Mr Fuller that was not a word of respect. I am not aware that I or that the present architects of the Capitol have at any time to any person or any body of persons said one word against his work, that we {were} not required to say in reply to questions addressed to us. If as he supposes, we did so in our published report it escaped us unintentionally and its significance was not recognized. That report was a report on the building not on its architect.

I know that it is difficult to think of them apart but that was what we were required to do, and that was what we did do.

We trace and in our minds we constantly have traced all the faults of the building—its excessive costliness more particularly, back to method under which most of its important characteristics seem to us to have probably been determined—that is to say by a body of gentlemen, having many differences of opinion needing to be reconciled as best they could and dealing with a subject with which no one of them had adequate experience, yet under the influence of a bad but strongly fixed custom denying to themselves the only method which the most highly educated and cultivated men in any part of the world have ever found to result satisfactorily.

Finally I wish to say a few words as to the matter of what is called the change of styles—we did not fall into that accidentally. We all of us recognized it as a somewhat grave matter and we did consider at great length; with much study; with prolonged debate in many sessions and with sketches and drawings both by Mr Richardson and Mr Eidlitz, whether it was practicable to accomplish what we were instructed to aim at, as well by any means which would not be open to that form of criticism and we were satisfied that it would not.

When I read the Memorial of the architects—gentlemen whom I [300] greatly respect, gentlemen who had conferred upon me an honorary distinction which I greatly valued and for which I felt very grateful to them, gentlemen whom I regarded as personal friends. I confess that when I read their apparently unqualified, indignant, instant and unanimous condemnation of a judgment to which my associates had been brought so deliberately and with so much care, I confess that I felt extreme surprise and great concern. And though I saw that it was hasty, inconsiderate {and} that it contained unconsciously & unintentionally, of course, errors of fact and allusions and insinuations for which there did not exist the slightest shadow of justification—I felt a momentary doubt whether we had not been in some way deceived in supposing that we had found a means of increasing the dignity, repose and harmony of aspect of the building—whether what we had imagined to be harmony might not be, as these gentlemen asserted "absolute want of harmony.” Turning it over in my mind I said to myself—"Why! it is not necessary that a man should be a practicing architect to determine such a question.” I called, then, on a distinguished painter and asked how it struck him—I called on a distinguished sculptor and asked him. The question was answered with a smile. Then I bethought me that there was one gentleman in the country who was peculiarly fitted to set me right if I was wrong in the matter. A gentleman who had made this very question of the historical sequence of styles—of schools, their origins and motive a special study and thus with advantages for the purpose such as no architect in the country has enjoyed—a devotee of art and a scholar withal of high culture. A man who has spent years in the close investigation of the more interesting architectural monumnts of Europe and whose business it has been to deduce general principles of art from what he found in them. A man who from his official position and the special studies which have qualified him for that position was likely to be peculiarly sensitive on the very point in question. Unquestionably, I suppose, the highest authority we have upon the subject. I mean the gentleman who occupies at Harvard University the chair of Art History.

I sent Profr Norton copies of the printed plans and of the protest of the architects, and asked him to kindly advise me whether it struck him that their point was well taken. I will if you please sir read a part of his reply—you shall have the whole if you desire. It was not written for publication but he has kindly given me permission to read it to you.

The protest of the New York Chapter American Institute of Architects against the designs of your Advisory Board for the completion of the State Capitol Building—does not pay any attention to the most important features of your designs, namely the general treatment of the walls so as to secure breadth of mass, and simplicity and dignity of aspect; and, secondly, the essential change in the character of the roof, a change which coincides in effect with your treatment of the walls, and is, apparently, further recommended by great constructive advantages. It is hardly credible that the Chapter does not recognize the excellence of your design in these respects under the given conditions by which it was primarily determined. The work [301] had advanced so far before you were called upon for advice that your designs are to be looked upon as simply the best modifications you can suggest in a structure radically vicious; and in this view they seem to me in all essential points excellent. I certainly do not find in them any "direct antagonism to the received rules of art.” They are antagonistic, it may be, to certain canons of building laid down by some architects of the Renaissance, canons deduced not from principles of art but from what were assumed to be classical models.

The objection of the New York Chapter to the surmounting of Italian Renaissance under-stories by "absolutely inharmonious Romanesque stories,” might have force if it were not a very open matter of question whether your upper stories are "absolutely inharmonious” with the lower. They seem to me to accord sufficiently in general character—not in simply technical style—with the part of the original building on which they are to rest.

Profr Norton a few days after writing this letter authorized me to make any use of his opinion that I wished. We have received expressions of convictions similar to those which it expresses from other gentlemen whose opinions upon the question are entitled, certainly, to as much respect as those which have been given to the legislature. We did not think it necessary and we questioned if it were decorous for us while holding our present position to engage in a public controversy on the subject or to seek to fortify the advice which as the appointed advisors of the state in the matter we have already given by bringing in volunteers to our assistance.

A quotation from the letter, however, I have thought that you would excuse, because not only of the exceptional position held by its author as a special scholar in the history of architectural art which you have been told that we have outraged but because it justifies me in assuring you that this question is one upon which it is not necessary that a man should be an architect in order to form some opinion for himself. The question as Mr Norton points out really is are the upper stories essentially inharmonious with the lower in general character or are they not?

I have as great deference as any man for the trained judgment of professional architects and I have always yielded to it in all proper occasions but it is a fact that upon this question trained judgments differ, and it is a fact that upon this question it is quite competent for a layman—for any member of the Committee—to form an opinion for himself and not be dependent on the possibility of rightly determining on which side the weight of professional judgment really lies. It cannot be done lightly. It cannot be done while you sit here in the Committee room, but it is not a mystery of the dark ages which can only be unlocked by one of the priesthood of art. I pray the Committee to use its own eyes and its own judgmnt.

We much regret Sir that we had no warning and no reason to suppose that the question of the plans as last year adopted under the direction of the legislature was to be thus reviewed. Not knowing this we had prepared no perspective drawings—no show drawings—the Protesting architects cautioned [302] the legislature against allowing its judgments to be beguiled by deceptive pictures. Go to the plan room Sir, and judge for yourself whether if such a caution was needed against whom it was needed. The only perspective of ours which you will find there—a pen and ink drawing, not glazed—was a drawing prepared to aid our judgmnt on a particular question upon which we were in some doubt. One of the Commissioners saw it in an office and asked us to have it filled out and framed. It is an accident that we have even so much, but while without an effort of the imagination such as few men without special training can use, you may not see the whole building before you as a picture—you will find the elevations and working drawings quite sufficient for an intelligent determination of the question which you have more particularly asked to decide.