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and jails, which for architectural achievement under adverse circum-
stances, will compare favorably with the same character of buildings to
be found throughout or land. In all these we see the fruit of the ar-
chitect's labors which inspires the hope of further advancement until the
profession shall attain the standing for which they are striving. But af-
ter all of our toils and work we will have to cease our labor, with our
task unfinished, and leave to those who come after us the completion
of that which we began.
There are several questions which will come before you, but none of
more importance than our proposed bill to regulate the practice of
architecture. This is a matter of improtance to every member, and
should receive their earnest support, and careful examination that it con-
tains nothing which would not stand confirmed in the courts and receive
the approbation of all enlightened and just men. There are persons
who make light of it, as there are of the same class who make light of any
thing when they do not comprehend its importance and are not enough
acquainted with history to know its age and its influence. Many
things which were once a neccessity at a given time and place have
ceased because the necessity which brought them forth has ceased; but
not so with our profession--its importance has increased with the
growth of years, until to day it stands as one of the three most promi-
nent in the secular professions practiced among the cultured and refined,
and its importance in any given locality is in the exact ratio of the cul-
ture and refinement of that locality.
Architecture, or the practice of building, is venerable with age and
honorable with the accumulation of yeas, and none need be ashamed
of it. It is co-existent with the human race, and in the history of the earliest times we read of human habitations and of the people buildings
cities: but it is not to be inferred from this that all understood building
any more than all understand building at this day, or that its praction-
ers had the knowledge or scientific exactness of those of succeeding
ages, or knew the convenience of the dwelling or public building. Like
all other wants coeval with man, it has gradually developed with the
wants and tastes and habits of our race as man has increased in knowl-
edge and advanced in science and civilization. In an aboriginal state
the wants of the people were few and simple in every department of
life, and it is to-day, not progressed beyond the demand of any
felt want in any given case, but as it is to-day, the architect, by his ge-
nius and knowledge, made the want felt by leading the people in paths
that brought them to right ideas, and conducted them to a higher
plane. From the first, human necessity required protection from the
summer heat and winter's cold; and diseases, wounds and sickness be-
got the use of medicine, however simple, to allay pain and heal sick-
ness and restore to health; and the wickedness of men produced crime,
which gave birth to the necessity for law to protect the innocent and
punish the guilty--hence these three avocations--architecture, medi-
cine and law, are the children born of the same parents, the frailities of
our nature and the needs of our race, each simple and rude in their be-
ginnings, but keeping pace with man in the increase of his knowledge
and the enlargement of his faculties.
But in their advancement they did not keep abreast each with the
other. Law nor medicine advanced to lead or to meet the wants of so-
ciety, as did the other, and neither of them have left monuments to
their skill and efficiency, either in material good, or in song or story,
that marks the achievements of the architects when the nations were in
their infancy. They have in Egypt to compare with her pyra-
mids, or her broken entablatures and fallen columns, broken and fallen
but wonderful even in their ruin, and eloquent with the history of the
architects, who, in science and knowledge, had outstipt all others.
There is no remembrance of either, which has come down the aisles of
time, in history or in their technical works, from cultured Greece or
classic Rome, which can stand with the genius of those who designed
their amphitheatres and their temples; while later yet, St. Peter's was
built, before medicine knew the functions of the heart, or had discover-
ed the circulation of the bloodl and St. PAul's had amazed the world
with the symmetry of its proportions and the grandeur of its magnitude
before Blackstone wrote his commentaries, and law was in a formative
state. Since that time, law and medicine have been pushed by means
of technical education, which has been provided by universities
and other institutions of learning, while architecture has made such pro-
gress without these adventitious aids, that the high plane to which
it would have attained with them, would be the envy of the
others. Thus by means of both a liberal and a technical education
the former two are more south after by men of education than the other,
and this mistake would not be so often made by men of merit if equal
facilities were provided for the technical education of each. I do not
see any sound reason why the state should make discriminations in pro-
viding facilities for the education of two of these brances and none for
the other. It is true, there is not the glamour and show in ours there
are in the others, nor is there the room for incapacity, but if the neces-
sity for this chair in our university is rightly apprehended by our law
makers they will not be long in making suitable provision for it. I have
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