Now the steel age was come with its deluge of things.
Man’s environment was made over twice in one generation. Nothing was
built but to be built again on a greater scale. It seemed impossible to
make anything big enough. Wonders were of a day’s duration.
In twenty-five years the country’s population doubled. In the same time
the production of things unto the use, happiness and discontent of
people increased five, ten, twenty fold. Man had now in his hand the
universal power of steel. It extended his arms and legs unimaginably,
grotesquely.
The production of metallic fibre increased more than one hundred fold.
Railways were built which if placed end to end and run around the globe
would have circled it six times. Those already grown when the steel age
came were not yet old when a ton of freight was transported more than
2,500 miles annually for each man, woman and child living on American
soil. Food was cheaper and more abundant than ever before in the life
of man because the railways, pursuing the sun, had suddenly opened a
virgin continent to bonanza farming. So was everything else. Modern
cities were made and were no sooner made than torn down and built over
again. Chicago grew faster than St. Louis because it had less to tear
down. Rivers were moved, mountains were levelled, swamps were lifted
up. Nothing was right as God left it.
O, bigger! and deeper! and higher!
O, faster! and cheaper! and plus!
And it is still incredible, like the Pyramids. Men lived in strife by
doing. They labored and brought it forth. There was never a moment to
think. There has not come that moment yet. What it was toward nobody
knows.
Steel was to make men free. They said this who required a slogan. Men
are not free. Why should they be? What shall they be free to do? Go to
and fro, perhaps. What shall they be free to think? Anything wherein is
refuge from the riddles they invent.
The men who delivered the steel age were not thinkers. They were
magicians who monkeyed with the elements until they had conjured forth
from the earth a spirit that said: “Serve me!”
Those who directly served it were of two kinds.
First were the men who thought with their hands. They were daring in
invention. Mechanical impossibilities intoxicated them. They abhorred a
pause in the production process as nature abhors a vacuum.
Next were the men of vision, who worked by inspiration, who had a
phantasy of things beyond the feeling of them, and ran ahead.
And since men of both kinds are more available here than in Europe the
steel age walked across the ocean.
Here were men like Thane whose genius fashioned tools in the guise of
sentient creatures,--walking tools, thinking tools, co-operating tools,
with eyes and ears and nerves and powers of discrimination. Human tools
but that they lacked the sense of good and evil.
Fancy a tool larger than an elephant keeping vigil before a row of
furnaces, pacing slowly up and down, apparently brooding, and then
at the right moment opening a door and plucking forth a block of
incandescent steel weighing many tons, neatly, with not the slightest
effort, and nowhere in sight a human being!
Fancy another tool to drudge and fag for this one! It comes running up,
stands still while the other gently lays upon its back the white-hot
slab, then runs and dumps it on a train of rollers.
That two hundred weight of flaming iron you saw swinging through the
gloom of Enoch’s mill in hand tongs now is a mass of ninety tons or
more, handled, carried hither, delivered there, shaped and forged, all
by automatic tools. The ladle no larger than a pot in which the fluid
iron was first decanted is now a car on wheels,--no, not one but many
in a string, hence called a ladle train, running through the night
behind a donkey locomotive, slopping over at the turns, on the way from
where the ore is smelted to where the mixers mix it and the converters
change it into steel.
The Thanes did that.
And here were men like John to say: “Give us a tariff protection of
six-tenths of a cent a pound for ten years and we will not only make
all our own steel wire hereafter but wire for all the world,”--who got
it and did it.
Here were men to say: “We spend half a million good American dollars
each year in England for tin cans to throw over the alley fence. Give
us a duty on tin plate and we will not only make our own but in ten
years other people will be throwing our cans over the fence,”--who got
it and proved it.
Here were men to say: “There is going to be only one steel concern in
the world. That’s us.”--They meant it literally.
They were men who knew not how to stop. They dared not stop. The one
who did was lost. Every little while they had to throw away everything
they had created, cast it out on the junk heap, because new ideas
came in so fast. It was nothing to scrap a million dollars’ worth
of machinery before it had settled in, a greater, faster engine of
production having just appeared. Whereas formerly every new thing
came from England, Germany or France, now Europe’s ironmongers were
continually coming over here to see what the Americans were doing and
how and why they had captured the steel age.
Later, when the pace of evolution began somewhat to abate, when
original discoveries were fewer and a steel mill would stand awhile,
when the wild and reckless youth of the steel age was past and Wall
Street found it out,--then all these dynamic, self-paramount men began
to get rich. And as you may suppose, they no more knew how to stop
getting rich than they knew how to stop anything else. Of that in its
right place.