It is, of course, a question whether architecture, in our time, will improve in its artistic character, or will deteriorate until that character is wholly lost. There is a tendency in each direction. The evil in?uences which cause the tendency downwards are numerous, and have been discussed on many occasions — the commercial demands which control nearly all costly buildings, the ignorance of the public men whose opinions control what is erected for the State, the changed position of the architect from that of a salaried artistic supervisor to that of a highly paid fiduciary administrator, and the disappearance from the modern world of the ancient instinct towards ornamental design. The good ih ?uence which causes a tendency upward is merely the slowly developed sense of our own short-comings caused by that very self-conscious, comparative study of ourselves and of the past which has injured architec tural design in the past but as we believe in the past only to help it greatly in the future.