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In Paris, in the city to which people have come for centuries when they wished to create beauty or to have it admired, where even a roly-poly pastry cook may wear a long tie and the title of the proudest profession, Ralph Adams Cram, famed U. S. architect, last week addressed the American Club: "The arts of the world are suffering an eclipse," said Architect Cram. "Creative music has almost ceased. Painting has fallen back and sculpture is in almost the same condition." Soon Architect Cram qualified this lugubrious assertion: "All the arts except American architecture have fallen back. The revival of American architecture since 1880 is one of the most remarkable manifestations of modern history.

"Ten years after the Civil War American architecture had reached the lowest depths of degeneration. There has been no parallel to the American architecture of that period in all history.

"Today, however, it is on a higher level than that of any other country in the world." Those who supposed that Architect Cram, when he spoke of "the higher level," was referring to the silver splinters of sky scrapers in Manhattan and elsewhere, were soon disabused. Architect Cram, apostle of the gothic, has only an academic interest in these astonishing and often beautiful towers. He disapproved of them on principle but said that he "would like to try to build one." Himself a great builder of churches, he referred to U. S. religious monuments:

"In church building we have eclipsed England, which until thirty years ago led the world. We have also surpassed France, which produced such magnificent churches in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

"Nowhere in Europe is ecclesiastical architecture expressing definite, concrete religion. Gothic is the perfect voicing of this, and nowhere is it to be found in modern work except in the United States."