By tyranny, as we now fight it, we mean control of the law, of legislation
and adjudication, by organizations which do not represent the people, by
means which are private and selfish. We mean, specifically, the conduct of
our affairs and the shaping of our legislation in the interest of special
bodies of capital and those who organize their use. We mean the alliance, for
this purpose, of political machines with selfish business. We mean the
exploitation of the people by legal and political means. We have seen many of
our governments under these influences cease to be representative
governments, cease to be governments representative of the people, and become
governments representative of special interests, controlled by machines,
which in their turn are not controlled by the people.

Sometimes, when I think of the growth of our economic system, it seems to me
as if, leaving our law just about where it was before any of the modern
inventions or developments took place, we had simply at haphazard extended
the family residence, added an office here and a workroom there, and a new
set of sleeping rooms there, built up higher on our foundations, and put out
little lean-tos on the side, until we have a structure that has no character
whatever. Now, the problem is to continue to live in the house and yet change
it.

Well, we are architects in our time, and our architects are also engineers.
We don't have to stop using a railroad terminal because a new station is
being built. We don't have to stop any of the processes of our lives because
we are rearranging the structures in which we conduct those processes. What
we have to undertake is to systematize the foundations of the house, then to
thread all the old parts of the structure with the steel which will be laced
together in modern fashion, accommodated to all the modern knowledge of
structural strength and elasticity, and then slowly change the partitions,
relay the walls, let in the light through new apertures, improve the
ventilation; until finally, a generation or two from now, the scaffolding
will be taken away, and there will be the family in a great building whose
noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single
community, co-operative as in a perfected, co-ordinated beehive, not afraid
of any storm of nature, not afraid of any artificial storm, any imitation of
thunder and lightning, knowing that the foundations go down to the bedrock of
principle, and knowing that whenever they please they can change that plan
again and accommodate it as they please to the altering necessities of their
lives.

But there are a great many men who don't like the idea. Some wit recently
said, in view of the fact that most of our American architects are trained in
a certain ecole in Paris, that all American architecture in recent years was
either bizarre or "Beaux Arts." I think that our economic architecture is
decidedly bizarre; and I am afraid that there is a good deal to learn about
matters other than architecture from the same source from which our
architects have learned a great many things. I don't mean the School of Fine
Arts at Paris, but the experience of France; for from the other side of the
water men can now hold up against us the reproach that we have not adjusted
our lives to modern conditions to the same extent that they have adjusted
theirs. I was very much interested in some of the reasons given by our
friends across the Canadian border for being very shy about the reciprocity
arrangements. They said: "We are not sure whither these arrangements will
lead, and we don't care to associate too closely with the economic conditions
of the United States until those conditions are as modern as ours." And when
I resented it, and asked for particulars, I had, in regard to many matters,
to retire from the debate. Because I found that they had adjusted their
regulations of economic development to conditions we had not yet found a way
to meet in the United States.