The buildings themselves, moreover, have become beautiful by expressing what we genuinely love to contemplate, and not all kinds of buildings were proper to that happy end. For mere sale and barter, any shed in the market-place might serve, but if we think of traffic in the large way that Ruskin suggested, as something potentially heroic and noble, as a feeding of the hungry and a clothing of the naked, as a soldierly occupying of outposts against poverty and wretchedness, as a campaign of conquest against nature, and as an exchange at last of spiritual hungers and satisfactions among men, then our houses of business should look like temples. So they begin to look, and only a very blind critic here and there still fails to see that so they should look. With our love of traffic goes our love of travel. In this country travel is necessary, but it is also an ideal. Any sort of railway station will serve as a place to buy a ticket or board a train, and until recently almost any kind of barracks did serve for those purposes. But the haphazard building could not express our delight in travel, our enjoyment of distance and speed and punctilious arrivings and departings. The pleasant casualness of the stage-coach and the road-side inn does not really appeal to us, except in exotic moments; our religion of travel is uttered in the Pennsylvania Station in New York, and in other such structures fast rising throughout the country, where the ritualistic atmosphere, produced by carefully selected elements from the buildings of antiquity, have little to do with buying your ticket and a great deal to do with the American spirit. We breathe more freely as we enter them, and enjoy the space and the height; our instinctive comment is, “This is something like!” as though some part of us had found expression at last. And if this success in architecture is as yet in the field of business and travel, among public buildings, the reason probably is that in those fields we know what our aspirations are. In ecclesiastical architecture, by way of contrast, we are less clear. We feel that if the Woolworth building is so lovely, it is but respectable to improve the appearance of our churches, so we put up very wonderful Gothic chapels and cathedrals—only to find, perhaps, that they are a sort of weight on our conscience rather than an expression of our desires; we sometimes try to cultivate the religion that produced them, in order that so eloquent a language may have more content in its words.