"And thus, when native instinct and sensibility shall govern the exercise of our beloved
art; when the known law, the respected law, shall be that form ever follows function;
when our architects shall cease strutting and prattling handcuffed and vainglorious in
the asylum of a foreign school; when it is truly felt, cheerfully accepted, that this law
opens up the airy sunshine of green fields, and gives to us a freedom that the very
beauty and sumptuousness of the outworking of the law itself as exhibited in nature
will deter any sane, any sensitive man from changing into license; when it becomes
evident that we are merely speaking a foreign language with a noticeable American
accent, whereas each and every architect in the land might, under the benign
influence of this law, express in the simplest, most modest, most natural way that
which il is in him to say: that he might really and would surely develop his own
characteristic individuality, and that the architectural art with him would certainly
become a living form of speech, a natural form of utterance, giving surcease to him
and adding treasures small and great to the growing art of his land; when we know
and feel that Nature is our friend, not our implacable enemy, that an afternoon in the
country, an hour by the sea, a full open view of one single day, through dawn, high
noon, and twilight, will suggest to us so much that is rhythmical, deep, and eternal in
the vast art of architecture, something so deep, so true, that all the narrow
formalities, hard-and-fast rules, and strangling bonds of the schools cannot stifle it in us, then it may be proclaimed that we are on the high-road to a natural and satisfying
art, an architecture that will soon become a fine art in the true, the best sense of the
word, an art that will live because it will be of the people, for the people, and by the
people."
