When the once vituperated and now lauded Governor Alexander R. Shepherd was changing this then squalid town into a modern city, he vigorously replied to objectors: "I throw the Nation's Capital into the lap of Congress. The responsibility is theirs. That responsibility they have heretofore neglected." Congress came to the rescue in 1874 and 1878, and again in 1901, as it always has done in times of crises. But why should crises arise? Why not, rather, intelligent, steady, efficient, and harmonious relations between Congress and residents to attain what all alike are striving for the most convenient, the best administered, the most comfortable, the grandest, and the most beautiful capital city ever attained by man? The dangerous period of ornamentation has arrived in Washington at the very time when art in this country, as in other countries, is in one of those chaotic conditions which follow such upheavals as that caused by the World War. In art, as in other activities, tradition and experience are scorned. A new and different world seems opening. Quick and easy solutions are hailed as the dawn. of a new era. Thinking and painstaking work give way to the inspirational expression of the untrained individualist. Such movements are ever recurring, even from the days of Cimabue in the thirteenth century. Out of them come progress in art only when to new insights into nature are added a skilled technique, expressing thought in beautiful form. The Commission of Fine Arts conceive it to be their province to test new movements in the light of experience of the past and also with an appreciation of new methods and new insights. The tradition of constant change should be interpreted in the terms of those permanent elements of fidelity to nature and the ever-controlling sense of beauty. The Commission believe, however, that to place before impressionable youth crude and unnatural work in painting and sculpture is to pervert their minds to their lasting hurt. Washington, of all cities in America, stands for permanence. Whatever goes toward its adornment should be designed for all time. It should not represent the fashions of the day. Commercial cities may build for 30 years; but when Washington builds a Pension Office, or a State, War, and Navy Building, or a post office according to a prevailing architectural vogue, the buildings remain as monuments of incompetency. Meantime the serene dignity of the Capitol, the White House, the Treasury, the old Patent Office, and the little "City Hall" find kinship with the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Supreme Court building, and all the other buildings based architecturally on classical precedents. CHAPTER II THE CENTRAL COMPOSITION REACHING COMPLETION The year of 1936 will see the completion of the outlines of the plan of 1901 and therefore of the L'Enfant plan of 1792. Much remains to be done to complete details both within the plan and also in the way of extensions implicit in it. Very much is required also for that embellishment-to use L'Enfant's word-upon which the enjoyment by the people of the Nation in their Capital City depends. Within a single generation Washington has been transformed by the citizens of the United States acting through their representatives, legislative, executive, judicial. This transformation has proceeded in an orderly, dignified, and even magnificent manner because at the beginning and again at the time of the awakening of our civic consciousness, Washington had the advantage of guiding plans made in both instances by men of experience with knowledge of the world's best precedents, men of supreme artistic taste. Above all these planners for the future were endowed with lofty conceptions of the boundless future of America and were imbued with a patriotic fervor to make their vision bright and penetrating. "Make no little plans", spoke Daniel H. Burnham in 1907, from the depths of his ardent convictions, "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty." In making their big plans the Senate Park Commission were actuated by their instructions. Said Senator James McMillan to the members of the Commission he had appointed: "Remember that Washington is the Capital of the United States. Nothing is too good for the Capital of the United States." When, in the course of their ever-expanding ideals, the members came to him with some large item of expenditure they deemed necessary, he did not hesitate, but said promptly, "Go ahead; if the Government won't pay for it, I will." They had inspiration, too, from that canny Scotchman, James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, who, on being consulted, |