“UNIVERSAL efforts show a universal want; and beauty of effect and decoration are no more a luxury in a civilized state of society than warmth and clothing are a luxury to any state: the mind, as the body, makes everything necessary that it is capable of permanently enjoying.
Ornament is one of the mind’s necessities, which it gratifies by means of the eye; and, in its strictest aesthetic sense, it has a perfect analogy with music, which similarly gratifies the mind, but by the means of a different organ—the ear. So ornament has been discovered to be again an essential element in commercial prosperity. This was not so at first, because, in a less cultivated state, we are quite satisfied with the gratification of our merely physical wants. But in an advanced state, the more extensive wants of the mind demand still more pressingly to be satisfied.
Hence, ornament is now as material an interest in a commercial community as even cotton itself, or, indeed, any raw material of manufacture whatever.”
- RALPH N. WORNUM
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