to his audience was the unmanliness of the thing, its tendency to vitiate the character of the offender, and its effect on his chances for success in life.

What was true of sex impurity was also true, in a minor measure, of cigarettesmoking and in a vastly greater measure of intemperance. I knew that I had made myself unpopular with the boys who lived in the house with me because I was in the habit of taking a cigarette after meals, but I could not see the ground of their objection. It was doing me no harm, and as I never smoked in the house, it could certainly not be offensive to them personally. Well, I got my answer toward the end of my freshman year, when I was invited to attend a "chalktalk" in the basement of the Methodist church. The performer, with a face that suggested at once a circus clown and an efficiency engineer, drew several sketches on an improvised blackboard designed to illustrate the dreadful career and fate of the cigarette-smoker. The first showed a dapper young man on the street corner blowing rings; the last represented nothing but a mound and a tombstone in the potter's field; and between the two was a scene in a bar-room, a ragged beggar, and a disreputable old man asleep in the gutter. The moral was clear.

There were no end of this curious kind of semi-secular meeting, and I went to them all. They furnished me with the clearest commentary on the religion of America. They answered my big question as nothing else could. The American

religion, I saw, was a vital, practical religion. If it was ethical, it was concretely so, and cared nothing about the philosophical abstractions underlying good and evil. It asked people to be good in order that the good they craved might come to them. Hence the virtues it preached were the virtues of thrift, sobriety, and manliness. If it was spiritual, its spirituality was the spirituality of every-day life. Its business was not to antagonize or to distract the ambitions and the purposes of its adherents, but to encourage them and to furnish a divine approval for them. Its concerns were with the common existence of the common man, and with all of that. Therefore it took sides in social issues and in political contests. It had an opinion on everything, because the common man in a democracy had an interest in everything. Whether a man should drink, whether a woman should dance, whether both should play at cards, were questions that moved. it more deeply than the problem of the immaculate conception and original sin. Like all other public institutions of the republic, it gave the people what the people wanted or were supposed to want. It was as human as a boy and as patriotic as the army. It approved of peace or war as the times and the interest of the country and the sentiment of the man on the street demanded, regardless of rigid, traditional principles. And it glorified the individual man and ministered to his prosperity and success because the world is made up of individual men, and when you have saved the individual soul, you have saved the world.

WHENEVER it is proposed to pre

"WH

pare plans for the Capitol," Thomas Jefferson wrote to Major L'Enfant in 1791, "I should prefer the adoption of some one of the models of antiquity, which have had the approbation of thousands of years; and for the President's house, I should prefer the celebrated fronts. of modern buildings, which have received the approbation of all good judges." "For the President's House," wrote Washington the following March, "I would design a building which should also look forward, but execute no more of it at present than might suit the circumstances of this country, when first it shall be wanted. A plan comprehending more improvements executed at a future period, when the wealth, population, and importance of it shall stand upon much higher ground than they do at present."

In these words were expressed the earliest ideas as to the house for the chief executive of the new republican nation, which within a century was to extend over the continent.

Although it has long been known that Jefferson, as secretary of state, took a deep interest in the building of the capital city, it has only recently been discovered that he himself prepared designs for the White

House, and actually submitted one of these anonymously in the public competition for which he had drafted the advertisement. The great collection of architectural drawings by his ancestor brought together through the efforts of the late Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Jr., includes a series of studies by Jefferson for a stately, square building, with a dome and four porticos, modeled on the famous Villa Rotonda near Vicenza. Among the competitive designs for the President's house preserved in Baltimore is a similar set, the only one not signed, distinguished by the pseudonymous initials "A. Z." These drawings prove to duplicate Jefferson's studies line for line and distance for distance, and leave not the smallest shadow of doubt that we have in them a most novel and important item of Jeffersoniana.

Jefferson's ability to make such drawings has until recently been denied in many quarters, and only the assemblage of an overwhelming body of evidence has convinced the skeptics of the truth of traditions regarding the great statesman's skill as an architect. Designs for his own remarkable house at Monticello, for a governor's house at Richmond, the Virginia capitol, and other buildings, had demonstrated his ability to undertake a plan for

the official residence of the President. A knowledge of foreign architecture and foreign architects, enthusiastically cultivated during his five years in Paris and his journeyings in France, England, Italy, and Germany, qualified him to make his design exceptional in scholarly conformity with the best precedents.

Jefferson evidently feared, in view of the weakness of the plans first sent in and of the dearth of trained architects in America, that none of the designs submitted would command respect if judged by cosmopolitan standards. Thus he was led to submit a design himself-a design not simply of his own invention, but based upon one of "the celebrated fronts of modern buildings." He chose for his model the masterpiece of Palladio, which had aroused the enthusiasm of Goethe, and had been imitated in many of the most famous houses of England. Despite the meagerness of his draftmanship, his design gives a suggestion of the unity and dignity notable in the original, which could not have failed to characterize also the building he proposed.

The imitation of the Villa Rotonda was not the only idea for the President's house which Jefferson embodied in a design. He had suggested to L'Enfant as models the façades of three buildings in Paris: the Galerie du Louvre, the palace in the Place de la Concorde, and the beautiful Hôtel de Salm, now the palace of the Legion of Honor. In an interesting sketch Jefferson attempted to combine the three, all similar in their Roman magnifi

cence, as the entrance front, the flanks, and the river front of the projected building.

Perhaps he thought the result too splendid to be consistent with republican simplicity. At all events, he did not complete or submit the design, and finally adopted the Italian model rather than the French ones.

Jefferson's design was not the one most favored at the judgment of the competition, and the choice fell on the plan of James Hoban, which established the main lines of the building as it stands to-day. According to popular tradition, Hoban's design was also taken from one of the "celebrated fronts of modern buildings," a less famous one, to be sure,-that of Leinster House in Dublin, Hoban's native city.

Hoban's original drawing of the façade is well known, but, strangely enough, no one has troubled to place it side by side with the façade of Leinster House. When this is done, one sees that, along with certain similarities, some of them common to many buildings of the eighteenth century, there are even more striking differences. Thus, whereas Hoban employs Ionic columns and basement windows with "rustic coigns," Leinster House has columns of the taller and richer Corinthian order, and a high basement with windows delicately framed. Aside from the entrance front, moreover, Leinster House has no resemblance to the White House either in its other faces or in its interior arrangement.

In a search elsewhere for Hoban's inspiration we are helped by the reappear

details of the interior which have been modified, and shows, too, that the great porticos to north and south were not features of the original scheme. If now we turn over the folios of engraved designs which often served as sources of suggestion to colonial architects, we find a building in which plan and façade alike corresponded in astonishing degree to Hoban's. It is in "A Book of Architecture" by James Gibbs, the disciple of Christopher Wren and architect of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, a favorite resource of early American builders as well as of students in the Royal Academy at Dublin. The "design for a Gentleman's house," which Hoban selected, has Ionic columns, basement, steps, and a hundred details as in his façade; and the plan, although somewhat rearranged, agrees So minutely with Hoban's

in many respects that there can be no doubt that Hoban worked with it before him.

There are indeed certain

admiration for the style of Leinster House may have suggested the choice of a more accessible model having some resemblance to it. The truth remains, however, that the White House was not copied from Leinster House, as has been believed, but, like many other American buildings of the time, was modeled on a design of Gibbs.

The plan chosen for the White House, although excellently adapted for the state functions of a future period, was not so devised as to make practicable Washington's other idea of executing only a part at first. The unwonted magnificence of the shell absorbed all the means available, and as the time for occupying the

building approached, it

was not only very unfinished internally, but lacking in some of the most elementary necessities. In January, 1800, Benjamin Stoddert, Adams's secretary of

the navy, wrote in alarm

to one of the