Mobocracy

“ It may likewise be seen how a separate caste would slowly develop itself, consisting of the trained architects and builders, the descendants of the first organizers of human labor, and systematical rulers of men.76
It may thus be seen how the realization of frequent danger, the necessity to provide an escape and insure the safety of the race, aided by experience, might lead to the conception of a vast pyramid, the mere building of which would create and establish the fundamental principles of organization and government. ”

“ Here they build hovels, which they surround from time to time with palisades and muddy entrenchments; and here, in these squalid abodes of ignorance and misery, the genius of Liberty, conducted by the spirit of Commerce, descends at last to awaken mankind from its sloth and cowardly stupor. ”

“ Property, that sacred fabric of government, had been attacked and destroyed, law had been defied, and yet the City Hall, the sanctuary of American tradition, was turned over to the alien mob for a continuous series of mass meetings. ”

“ In large vaults beneath are buried the heroes of 1789, with the victims of the later revolution of 1848. The capital of the column is crowned with an artistic Genius of Liberty standing on a globe, and holding in one hand the broken chains of slavery, and in the other the torch of enlightenment. ”

“ What a strange infatuation, to demolish an aristocracy and yet to exclude a people! What an anomaly in political architecture, to build an inverted pyramid! Where was the safety-valve of governments, where the natural vents of excitement in a population so inflammable? ”

“ Like all other edifices, local self-government is built up from below. It is built on its own foundation. You cannot begin replacing an edifice by removing the top or middle stones and replacing them with others. ”

“ Would you have states driven like clouds? Disorder cannot build up order. With chaos for an architect, the edifice would be a Babel. And, besides, what tyranny is this pretended liberty! As for me, I wish to enjoy myself; not to govern. ”

“ The present government gave every facility to those who advocated popular principles with the aim of feathering their own nests. Under the influence of the social craze all that tended to promote external beauty of architecture or equipment was discountenanced, and a sodden rule of ignorant craft and vulgarity was settled upon the nation. ”

“ The specialized, interdependent structure of civilization with its city control of the hinterland, its products and inhabitants, enabled the city-centered oligarchy to accumulate and concentrate wealth and monopolize power, to skim the cream from the available milk, monopolize the cream, distribute the skimmed milk judiciously and thus perpetuate its ascendancy through generations and centuries. During periods of expansion civilized communities develop a dynamism which maintains their ascendancy. In subsequent periods of contraction form takes over, imposing conformity on the status quo. ”

“ A fierce democracy reigned, banishing nobles, razing their palaces, and ploughing up the salt-sown sites; till at last, in the uttermost paroxysm of madness, it delivered itself up to lords to be defended from itself, and was crushed into the abjectest depths of slavery. Literature and architecture flourished, and the sister arts were born amid the struggles of human nature convulsed with every abominable passion. ”

“ As for the mob of great cities, whom you accuse me of despising too much, I think it is impossible to err on that side. They are the very riddlings of society, in which every useful cinder is, by various processes, withdrawn, and nothing left but dust, ashes, and filth. ”

“ Obviously, the cities housed the machinery of government and the matter-transmitters by which the Empire communicated with its subject worlds and the food-synthesizers and the shelters in which men were accustomed to live and the baths and lecture-halls and amusement-centers in which they diverted themselves. ”

“ Between the luxury and splendor of the king's court and the poverty of the common people there is of course the greatest and most painful contrast. The palaces of the king are filled with whatever the wealth and power of their owner can procure. The hovels of the common peasants are bare and comfortless, the furniture consisting only of a few coarse vessels of earthenware or wicker-work, and a mat or two spread upon the floor. ”

“ Acquisitiveness is pulling down walled fortresses; the careless agriculturist, unmindful of the sacredness of the ditch and mound that scar his fields, is sowing and reaping where marble monuments should stand; and improvement, a very Cambyses among achievements of labor of former times, under the fair mask of refined taste, is leveling nearly all that remains of the architecture of the Revolution. ”

“ The first principles of the feudal system, which form the basis of the whole edifice, are: that the land is the property of the sovereign; that the inhabitants are his slaves, and can therefore possess no property, all that they have and all that they can obtain belonging to the sovereign, who allows them to keep it no longer than he chooses; and that the will of the prince is the supreme law. ”

“ This is a pretty comment upon the grand achievements of modern industry and science; but it is better, perhaps, that men should be foolish than that they should be completely dehumanized.
The architecture of other civilizations has sometimes been the brutal emblem of the warrior, like that of the Assyrians: it has remained for the architecture of our own day in America to be fixed and stereotyped and blank, like the mind of a Robot. ”

“ Every year every minor local governing body pulls down a building selected by local plebiscite, and the greater Government pays a slight compensation to the owner, and resumes possession of the land it occupies. ”

“ The base of the pyramid of civilization which rests upon the soil is shrinking through the drift of population from farm to city. For a generation we have been expressing more or less concern about this tendency. ”

“ In so far as we have learned to care more for empire than for a community of freemen, living the good life, more for dominion over palm and pine than for the humane discipline of ourselves, the architect has but enshrined our desires. ”

“ Hence we refer to village politics, town politics, national politics, international politics and, in the present instance, to the politics of civilization as a way of life.
Each sample, referred to in our examination of typical civilizations, was built around a center, nucleus or homeland consisting of one or more cities with their adjacent hinterlands. The nucleus of the developing civilization was also the nucleus of an empire. Each nucleus was a center of planned production; accumulating wealth, growing population and expanding authority. ”

“ The growth of national power, either in the form of royalty or parliamentary government, stripped the great lords of individual power and importance, and of their jurisdiction and power over persons, and so repressed striking abuses. ”

“ The roof could not be mended, or, at least, it could not be mended much, without upsetting the capitalist balance, or, rather, disproportion in society; for a man with a roof is a man with a house, and to that extent his house is his castle. ”

“ Unlike the pillars of human architecture, chipped and chiselled in bustling, dusty quarries, and hoisted to their site by sweat of brow and creak of pulley, these rose to fairest proportion by the life that was in them, and blossomed into foliated capitals three hundred feet overhead. ”

“ You may pathetically plead to the people’s majority, that the divided lands will not give much more than the length and breadth of his grave to each mob-proprietor. They will answer, “We will have what we can get;—at all events, you shall keep it no longer.” ”

“ The architects were great, the king's thought was great—but only in one way—and everyone—the whole class—forgot the real meaning of noblesse oblige, and abused their power—and so the revolution swept them away—They put false value upon everything—false values upon birth and breeding—and no value upon their consequent obligations, or upon character—. ”

“ Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which, bending over to the earth, takes root and becomes a fig-tree itself. Each branch may become a dynasty. On the sole condition that it shall bend down to the people. ”

“ But, after all, there is something imposing in a system which gives a man his own land, his house built of his own timber, his bricks made of his own red clay, his servants clothed and shod by his own workmen, his own blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, shoemakers—in short, a little kingdom of which he is the sovereign. ”

“ This imaginary fact they account for by supposing, that nobles and opulent citizens were deterred from indulging in the luxuries of architecture by the form of government and the envious jealousy of the common people. ”

“ For some time mobs of ten, twenty, and thirty thousand people collected daily, surrounded the Parliament-house, huzzaed the members, even entered the doors and examined into their conduct, took the horses out of the carriages of those who did well, and drew them home. ”

“ A few acres to till for food and a roof, however bumble, over your head, are the castle of your independence, and when you have it you are fortified to act and vote independently whenever your interests are at stake. ”

“ Even this arrangement is difficult to treat; and it is usually safer to increase or diminish the height of the divisions regularly as they rise, as in the Doge's Palace, whose three divisions are in a bold geometrical propression: or, in towers, to get an alternate proportion between the body, the belfry, and the crown, as in the campanile of St Mark's. But, at all events, get rid of equality; leave that to children and their card houses; the laws of nature and the reason of man are alike against it, in arts, as in politics. ”

“ Neglected plants and chaotic systems are monuments, kept at national expense, to these amiable bench-warmers and trimmers. The second variety rides the waves for a season or two, and crashes down finally, as all tyrants, however benevolent, before the clamorous indignation of outraged and inefficient democracy. ”

“ And, since building was the order of the day, there were wise men in the councils of the Free Nations who saw that they must destroy the Emperor's handiwork and build instead a Castle of their own, where Liberty, International Honour, and many other lovely things might find a home. ”

“ After eight hundred years, in spite of so many strokes of the royal ax, and the immense change in the culture of society, the old feudal root lasts and still vegetates. We remark it first in the distribution of property.1204 A fifth of the soil belongs to the crown and the communes, a fifth to the Third-Estate, a fifth to the rural population, a fifth to the nobles and a fifth to the clergy. Accordingly, if we deduct the public lands, the privileged classes own one-half of the kingdom. ”

“ Just at this moment the new architects appear, with their specious arguments and their ready-made plans, proving that every great public structure, religious and moral, and all communities, cannot be otherwise than barbarous and unhealthy, since, thus far, they are built up out of bits and pieces, by degrees, and generally by fools and savages, in any event by common masons, who built aimlessly, feeling their way and devoid of principles. ”

“ The People's Palace, to replace the people's hovels, is no fanciful project or arbitrary contrivance, but the natural, inevitable form of the household required by our civilization, corresponding strictly with all our improved methods of productive industry ”

“ With property also came in gradually the principle of aristocracy, striving for the creation of privileged classes. The element of property, which has con [Pg 342] trolled society to a great extent during the comparatively short period of civilization, has given mankind despotism, imperialism, monarchy, privileged classes, and finally representative democracy. It has also made the career of the civilized nations essentially a property-making career. ”

“ And so when we erect a public building, we make a hollow in the largest corner stone and carefully seal within it some mementos of our day, looking forward to the time when our works shall be ruins and ourselves forgotten. ”

“ Of all obstacles to that complete democracy of which we dream, is there a greater than property? ”

“ For, in such an environment, life would be fuller, finer and more reasonable, and democracy, for the first time since the days of the beautiful old towns of the Early Republic, would again be on the way to having a setting worthy of it. ”

“ In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution. ”

“ The statesman and politician then are susceptible of all the seduction of ostentation and the pride of pomp! Who would have credited it? But bewildered with power, in the magnificence and magnitude of the edifices which their colossal greatness inhabits, they seem to contemplate on its image! ”

“ They are well aware that the ugly edifice is built of rotten timbers, and stands on slippery sands—if the loud voice of public opinion could be made to reverberate through its dreary chambers, the unsightly frame would fall, never to rise again. ”

“ I say then that such a principality is obtained either by the favour of the people or by the favour of the nobles. Because in all cities these two distinct parties are found, and from this it arises that the people do not wish to be ruled nor oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles wish to rule and oppress the people; and from these two opposite desires there arises in cities one of three results, either a principality, self-government, or anarchy. ”