AT WASHINGTON
I
Washington as Anti-climax
I came to Washington full of expectations and curiosities. Here, I
felt, so far as it could exist visibly and palpably anywhere, was
the head and mind of this colossal America over which my observant
curiosities had wandered. In this place I should find, among other
things, perhaps as many as ten thousand men who would not be concerned
in trade. There would be all the Senators and representatives, their
secretaries and officials, and four thousand and more scientific and
literary men of Washington's institutions and libraries, the diplomatic
corps, the educational centres, the civil service, the writers and
thinking men who must inevitably be drawn to this predestined centre. I
promised myself arduous intercourse with a teeming intellectual life.
Here I should find questions answered, discover missing clues, get hold
of the last connections in my inquiry. I should complete at Washington
my vision of America; my forecast would follow.
I don't precisely remember how this vision departed. I know only that
after a day or so in Washington an entirely different conception was
established, a conception of Washington as architecture and avenues,
as a place of picture post-cards and excursions, with sightseers
instead of thoughts going to and fro. I had imagined that in Washington
I should find such mentally vigorous discussion-centres as the New
York X Club on a quite magnificent scale. Instead, I found the chief
scientific gathering-place has, like so many messes in the British
army before the Boer war, a rule against talking "shop." In all
Washington there is no clearing-house of thought at all; Washington has
no literary journals, no magazines, no publications other than those
of the official specialist--there does not seem to be a living for a
single firm of publishers in this magnificent empty city.
I went about the place in a state of ridiculous and deepening concern.
I went through the splendid Botanical Gardens, through the spacious
and beautiful Capitol, and so to the magnificently equipped Library
of Congress. There in an upper chamber that commands an altogether
beautiful view of long vistas of avenue and garden to that stupendous
unmeaning obelisk (the work of the women of America) that dominates
all Washington, I found at last a little group of men who could talk.
It was like a small raft upon a limitless empty sea. I lunched with
them at their Round Table, and afterwards Mr. Putnam showed me the
Rotunda, quite the most gracious reading-room dome the world possesses,
and explained the wonderful mechanical organization that brings almost
every volume in that immense collection within a minute of one's hand.
"With all this," I asked him, "why doesn't the place _think_?" He
seemed, discreetly, to consider it did.
[Illustration: IN THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY]
It was in the vein of Washington's detached deadness that I should
find Professor Langley (whose flying experiments I have followed for
some years with close interest) was dead, and I went through the
long galleries of archæological specimens and stuffed animals in the
Smithsonian Institution to inflict my questions upon his temporary
successor, Dr. Cyrus Adler. He had no adequate excuses. He found a
kind of explanation in the want of enterprise of American publishers,
so that none of them come to Washington to tap its latent resources of
knowledge and intellectual capacity; but that does not account for the
absence of any traffic in ideas. It is perhaps near the truth to say
that this dearth of any general and comprehensive intellectual activity
is due to intellectual specialization. The four thousand scientific men
in Washington are all too energetically busy with ethnographic details,
electrical computations, or herbaria to talk about common and universal
things. They ought not to be so busy, and a science so specialized
sinks half-way down the scale of sciences. Science is one of those
things that cannot hustle; if it does, it loses its connections.
In Washington some men, I gathered, hustle, others play bridge, and
general questions are left, a little contemptuously, as being of the
nature of "gas," to the newspapers and magazines. Philosophy, which
correlates the sciences and keeps them subservient to the universals
of life, has no seat there. My anticipated synthesis of ten thousand
minds refused, under examination, to synthesize at all; it remained
disintegrated, a mob, individually active and collectively futile, of
specialists and politicians.
II
The City of Conversation
But that is only one side of Washington life, the side east and
south of the White House. Northwestward I found, I confess, the most
agreeable social atmosphere in America. It is a region of large fine
houses, of dignified and ample-minded people, people not given over
to "smartness" nor redolent of dollars, unhurried and reflective, not
altogether lost to the wider aspects of life. In Washington I met
again that peculiarly aristocratic quality I had found in Harvard--in
the person of President Eliot, for example--an aristocratic quality
that is all the finer for the absence of rank, that has integral in
it--books, thought, and responsibility. And yet I could have wished
these fine people more alive to present and future things, a little
less established upon completed and mellowing foundations, a little
less final in their admirable finish....
There was, I found, a little breeze of satisfaction fluttering the
Washington atmosphere in this region. Mr. Henry James came through the
States last year distributing epithets among their cities with the
justest aptitude. Washington was the "City of Conversation"; and she
was pleasantly conscious that she merited this friendly coronation.
Washington, indeed, converses well, without awkwardness, without
chatterings, kindly, watchful, agreeably witty. She lulled and tamed my
purpose to ask about primary things, to discuss large questions. Only
once, and that was in an after-dinner duologue, did I get at all into a
question in Washington. For the rest, Washington remarked and alluded
and made her point and got away.
III
Mount Vernon
And Washington, with a remarkable unanimity and in the most charming
manner, assured me that if I came to see and understand America I
must on no account miss Mount Vernon. To have passed indifferently
by Concord was bad enough, I was told, but to ignore the home of
the first president, to turn my back upon that ripe monument of
colonial simplicity, would be quite criminal neglect. To me it was a
revelation how sincerely insistent they were upon this. It reminded
me of an effect I had already appreciated very keenly in Boston--and
even before Boston, when Mr. Z took me across Spuyten Duyvil into
the country of Sleepy Hollow, and spoke of Cornwallis as though he
had died yesterday--and that is the longer historical perspectives
of America. America is an older country than any European one, for
she has not rejuvenesced for a hundred and thirty years. In endless
ways America fails to be contemporary. In many respects, no doubt,
she is decades in front of Europe, in mechanism, for example, and
productive organization, but in very many other and more fundamental
ones she is decades behind. Go but a little way back and you will
find the European's perspectives close up; they close at '71, at '48,
down a vista of reform bills, at Waterloo and the treaty of Paris,
at the Irish Union, at the coming of Victor Emanuel; Great Britain,
for example, in the last hundred years has reconstructed politically
and socially, created half her present peerage, evolved the Empire of
India, developed Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, fought fifty
considerable wars. Mount Vernon, on the other hand, goes back with
unbroken continuity, a broad band of mellow tradition, to the War of
Independence.
Well, I got all that in conversation at Washington, and so I didn't
need to go to Mount Vernon, after all. I got all that about 1777,
and I failed altogether to get anything of any value whatever about
1977--which is the year of greater interest to me. About the direction
and destinies of that great American process that echoes so remotely
through Washington's cool gracefulness of architecture and her
umbrageous parks, this cultivated society seemed to me to be terribly
incurious and indifferent. It was alive to political personalities, no
doubt, its sons and husbands were Senators, judges, ambassadors, and
the like; it was concerned with their speeches and prospects, but as
to the trend of the whole thing Washington does not picture it, does
not want to picture it. I found myself presently excusing myself for
Mount Vernon on the ground that I was not a retrospective American, but
a go-ahead Englishman, and so apologizing for my want of reverence for
venerable things. "We are a young people," I maintained. "We are a new
generation."
IV
In the Senate-House
I went to see the Senate debating the railway-rate bill, and from
the Senatorial gallery I had pointed out to me Tillman and Platt,
Foraker and Lodge, and all the varied personalities of the assembly.
The chamber is a circular one, with enormously capacious galleries.
The members speak from their desks, other members write letters, read
(and rustle) newspapers, sit among accumulations of torn paper, or
stand round the apartment in audibly conversational groups. A number of
messenger-boys--they wear no uniform--share the floor of the House with
the representatives, and are called by clapping the hands. They go to
and fro, or sit at the feet of the Vice-President. Behind and above the
Vice-President the newspaper men sit in a state of partial attention,
occasionally making notes for the vivid descriptions that have long
since superseded verbatim reports in America. The public galleries
contain hundreds of intermittently talkative spectators. For the most
part these did not seem to me to represent, as the little strangers'
gallery in the House of Commons represents, interests affected. They
were rather spectators seeing Washington, taking the Senate _en route_
for the obelisk top and Mount Vernon. They made little attempt to hear
the speeches.
In a large distinguished emptiness among these galleries is the space
devoted to diplomatic representatives, and there I saw, sitting in a
meritorious solitude, the British _charge d'affaires_ and his wife
following the debate below. I found it altogether too submerged for me
to follow. The countless spectators, the Senators, the boy messengers,
the comings and goings kept up a perpetual confusing babblement. One
saw men walking carelessly between the Speaker and the Vice-President,
and at one time two gentlemen with their backs to the member in
possession of the House engaged the Vice-President in an earnest
conversation. The messengers circulated at a brisk trot, or sat on the
edge of the dais exchanging subdued badinage. I have never seen a more
distracted Legislature.
The whole effect of Washington is a want of concentration, of something
unprehensile and apart. It is on, not in, the American process. The
place seems to me to reflect, even in its sounds and physical forms,
that dispersal of power, that evasion of a simple conclusiveness,
which is the peculiar effect of that ancient compromise, the American
Constitution. The framers of that treaty were haunted by two terrible
bogies, a military dictatorship and what they called "mob rule,"
they were obsessed by the need of safeguards against these dangers,
they were controlled by the mutual distrust of constituent States
far more alien to one another than they are now, and they failed to
foresee both the enormous assimilation of interests and character
presently to be wrought by the railways and telegraphs, and the huge
possibilities of corruption, elaborate electrical arrangements offer
to clever unscrupulous men. And here in Washington is the result, a
Legislature that fails to legislate, a government that cannot govern,
a pseudo-responsible administration that offers enormous scope for
corruption, and that is perhaps invincibly intrenched behind the
two-party system from any insurgence of the popular will. The plain
fact of the case is that Congress, as it is constituted at present,
is the feeblest, least accessible, and most inefficient central
government of any civilized nation in the worst west of Russia.
Congress is entirely inadequate to the tasks of the present time.
I came away from Washington with my pre-conception enormously
reinforced that the supreme need of America, the preliminary thing to
any social or economic reconstruction, is political reform. It seems
to me to lie upon the surface that America has to be democratized.
It is necessary to make the Senate and the House of Representatives
more interdependent, and to abolish the possibilities of deadlocks
between them, to make election to the Senate direct from the people,
and to qualify and weaken the power of the two-party system by the
introduction of "second ballots" and the referendum....
But how such drastic changes are to be achieved constitutionally in
America I cannot imagine. Only a great educated, trained, and sustained
agitation can bring about so fundamental a political revolution, and at
present I can find nowhere even the beginnings of a realization of this
need.
V
President Roosevelt
In the White House, set midway between the Washington of the sightseers
and the Washington of brilliant conversation, I met President
Roosevelt. I was mightily pleased by the White House; it is dignified
and simple--once again am I tempted to use the phrase "aristocratic
in the best sense" of things American; and an entire absence of
uniforms or liveries creates an atmosphere of Republican equality
that is reinforced by "Mr. President's" friendly grasp of one's
undistinguishable hand. And after lunch I walked about the grounds with
him, and so achieved my ambition to get him "placed," as it were, in my
vision of America.
In the rare chances I have had of meeting statesmen, there has always
been one common effect, an effect of their being smaller, less audible,
and less saliently featured than one had expected. A common man
builds up his picture of the men prominent in the great game of life
very largely out of caricature, out of head-lines, out of posed and
"characteristic" portraits. One associates them with actresses and
actors, literary poseurs and such-like public performers, anticipates
the same vivid self-consciousness as these display in common
intercourse, keys one's self up for the paint on their faces, and for
voices and manners altogether too accentuated for the gray-toned lives
of common men. I've met politicians who remained at that. But so soon
as Mr. Roosevelt entered the room, "Teddy," the Teddy of the slouch
hat, the glasses, the teeth, and the sword, that strenuous vehement
Teddy (who had, let me admit, survived a full course of reading in the
President's earlier writings) vanished, and gave place to an entirely
negotiable individuality. To-day, at any rate, the "Teddy" legend is
untrue. Perhaps it wasn't always quite untrue. There was a time during
the world predominance of Mr. Kipling, when I think the caricature
must have come close to certain of Mr. Roosevelt's acceptances and
attitudes. But that was ten years and more ago, and Mr. Roosevelt to
this day goes on thinking and changing and growing....
For me, anyhow, that strenuousness has vanished beyond recalling, and
there has emerged a figure in gray of a quite reasonable size, with a
face far more thoughtful and perplexed than strenuous, with a clinched
hand that does indeed gesticulate, though it is by no means a gigantic
fist--and with quick movements, a voice strained indeed, a little
forced for oratory, but not raised or aggressive in any fashion, and
friendly screwed-up eyes behind the glasses.
It isn't my purpose at all to report a conversation that went from
point to point. I wasn't interviewing the President, and I made no note
at the time of the things said. My impression was of a mind--for the
situation--quite extraordinarily open. That is the value of President
Roosevelt for me, and why I can't for the life of my book leave
him out. He is the seeking mind of America displayed. The ordinary
politician goes through his career like a charging bull, with his eyes
shut to any changes in the premises. He locks up his mind like a powder
magazine. But any spark may fire the mind of President Roosevelt.
His range of reading is amazing; he seems to be echoing with all the
thought of the time, he has receptivity to the pitch of genius. And he
does not merely receive, he digests and reconstructs; he thinks. It is
his political misfortune that at times he thinks aloud. His mind is
active with projects of solution for the teeming problems around him.
Traditions have no hold upon him--nor, his enemies say, have any but
quite formal pledges. It is hard to tie him. In all these things he is
to a single completeness, to mind and will of contemporary America. And
by an unparalleled conspiracy of political accidents, as all the world
knows, he has got to the White House. He is not a part of the regular
American political system at all--he has, it happens, stuck through.
Now my picture of America is, as I have tried to make clear, one of a
gigantic process of growth, of economic coming and going, spaced out
over vast distances and involving millions of hastening men; I see
America as towns and urgency and greatnesses beyond, I suppose, any
precedent that has ever been in the world. And like a little island of
order amid that ocean of enormous opportunity and business turmoil and
striving individualities, is this District of Columbia, with Washington
and its Capitol and obelisk. It is a mere pin-point in the unlimited,
on which, in peace times, the national government lies marooned,
twisted up into knots, bound with safeguards, and altogether impotently
stranded. And peering closely, and looking from the Capitol down the
vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, I see the White House, minute and clear,
with a fountain playing before it, and behind it a railed garden set
with fine trees. The trees are not so thick, nor the railings so high
but that the people on the big "seeing Washington" cannot crane to look
into it and watch whoever walk about it. And in this garden goes a
living speck, as it were, in gray, talking, swinging a white clinched
hand, and trying vigorously and resolutely to get a hold upon the
significance of the whole vast process in which he and his island of
government are set.
Always before him there have been political resultants, irrelevancies
and futilities of the White House; and after him, it would seem, they
may come again. I do not know anything of the quality of Mr. Bryan,
who may perhaps succeed him. He, too, is something of an exception, it
seems, and keeps a still developing and inquiring mind. Beyond is a
vista of figures of questionable value so far as I am concerned. They
have this in common that they don't stand for thought. For the present,
at any rate, a personality, extraordinarily representative, occupies
the White House. And what he chooses to say publicly (and some things
he says privately) are, by an exceptional law of acoustics, heard in
San Francisco, in Chicago, in New Orleans, in New York and Boston, in
Kansas, and Maine, throughout the whole breadth of the United States
of America. He assimilates contemporary thought, delocalizes and
reverberates it. He is America for the first time vocal to itself.
What is America saying to itself?
I've read most of the President's recent speeches, and they fall in
oddly with that quality in his face that so many photographs even
convey, a complex mingling of will and a critical perplexity. Taken all
together they amount to a mass of not always consistent suggestions,
that and conflict overlap. Things crowd upon him, rebate scandals,
insurance scandals, the meat scandals, this insecurity and that. The
conditions of his position press upon him. It is no wonder he gives out
no single, simple note....
The plain fact is that in the face of the teeming situations of to-day
America does not know what to do. Nobody, except those happily gifted
individuals who can see but one aspect of an intricate infinitude,
imagines any simple solution. For the rest the time is one of
ample, vigorous, and at times impatient inquiry, and of intense
disillusionment with old assumptions and methods. And never did a
President before so reflect the quality of his time. The trend is
altogether away from the anarchistic individualism of the nineteenth
century, that much is sure, and towards some constructive scheme which,
if not exactly socialism, as socialism is defined, will be, at any
rate, closely analogous to socialism. This is the immense change of
thought and attitude in which President Roosevelt participates, and to
which he gives a unique expression. Day by day he changes with the big
world about him--contradicts himself....
I came away with the clear impression that neither President
Roosevelt nor America will ever, as some people prophesy, "declare
for socialism," but my impression is equally clear, that he and all
the world of men he stands for, have done forever with the threadbare
formulæ that have served America such an unconscionable time. We talked
of the press and books and of the question of color, and then for a
while about the rôle of the universities in the life of the coming time.
Now it is a curious thing that as I talked with President Roosevelt in
the garden of the White House there came back to me quite forcibly that
undertone of doubt that has haunted me throughout this journey. After
all, does this magnificent appearance of beginnings which is America,
convey any clear and certain promise of permanence and fulfilment
whatever? Much makes for construction, a great wave of reform is going
on, but will it drive on to anything more than a breaking impact upon
even more gigantic uncertainties and dangers. Is America a giant
childhood or a gigantic futility, a mere latest phase of that long
succession of experiments which has been and may be for interminable
years--may be indeed altogether until the end--man's social history?
I can't now recall how our discursive talk settled towards that, but
it is clear to me that I struck upon a familiar vein of thought in
the President's mind. He hadn't, he said, an effectual disproof of
any pessimistic interpretation of the future. If one chose to say
America must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all
mankind must culminate and pass, he could not conclusively deny that
possibility. Only he chose to live as if this were not so.
That remained in his mind. Presently he reverted to it. He made a sort
of apology for his life against the doubts and scepticisms that, I
fear, must be in the background of the thoughts of every modern man
who is intellectually alive. He mentioned a little book of mine, an
early book full of the deliberate pessimism of youth, in which I drew
a picture of a future of decadence, of a time when constructive effort
had fought its fight and failed, when the inevitable segregations
of an individualistic system had worked themselves out and all the
hope and vigor of humanity had gone forever. The descendants of the
workers had become etiolated, sinister, and subterranean monsters, the
property-owners had degenerated into a hectic and feebly self-indulgent
race, living fitfully amid the ruins of the present time. He became
gesticulatory, and his straining voice a note higher in denying this
as a credible interpretation of destiny. With one of those sudden
movements of his, he knelt forward in a garden chair--we were standing
before our parting beneath the colonnade--and addressed me very
earnestly over the back, clutching it, and then thrusting out his
familiar gesture, a hand first partly open and then closed.
"Suppose after all," he said, slowly, "that should prove to be right,
and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. _That doesn't matter
now._ The effort's real. It's worth going on with. It's worth it. It's
worth it--even then."...
I can see him now and hear his unmusical voice saying "The effort--the
effort's worth it," and see the gesture of his clinched hand and
the--how can I describe it? the friendly peering snarl of his face,
like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind as that,
as a very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations,
its doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence amid perplexities and
confusions. He kneels out, assertive against his setting--and his
setting is the White House with a background of all America.
I could almost write, with a background of all the world--for I
know of no other a tithe so representative of the creative purpose,
the _good-will_ in men as he. In his undisciplined hastiness, his
limitations, his prejudices, his unfairness, his frequent errors, just
as much as in his force, his sustained courage, his integrity, his open
intelligence, he stands for his people and his kind.
THE ENVOY
And at last I am back in my study by the sea. It is high June. When
I said good-bye to things it was March, a March warm and eager to
begin with, and then dashed with sleet and wind; but the daffodils
were out, and the primulas and primroses shone brown and yellow in
the unseasonable snow. The spring display that was just beginning
is over. The iris rules. Outside the window is a long level line of
black fleur-de-lys rising from a serried rank of leaf-blades. Their
silhouettes stand out against the brightness of the twilight sea. They
mark, so opened, two months of absence. And in the interval I have seen
a great world.
I have tried to render it as I saw it. I have tried to present the
first exhilaration produced by the sheer growth of it, the morning-time
hopefulness of spacious and magnificent opportunity, the optimism of
successful, swift, progressive effort in material things. And from that
I have passed to my sense of the chaotic condition of the American
will, and that first confidence has darkened more and more towards
doubt again. I came to America questioning the certitudes of progress.
For a time I forgot my questionings; I sincerely believed, "These
people can do anything," and, now I have it all in perspective, I
have to confess that doubt has taken me again. "These people," I say,
"might do anything. They are the finest people upon earth--the most
hopeful. But they are vain and hasty; they are thoughtless, harsh, and
undisciplined. In the end, it may be, they will accomplish nothing."
I see, I have noted in its place, the great forces of construction,
the buoyant, creative spirit of America. But I have marked, too, the
intricacy of snares and obstacles in its path. The problem of America,
save in its scale and freedom, is no different from the problem of
Great Britain, of Europe, of all humanity; it is one chiefly moral and
intellectual; it is to resolve a confusion of purposes, traditions,
habits, into a common ordered intention. Everywhere one finds what
seem to me the beginnings of that--and, for this epoch it is all too
possible, they may get no further than beginnings. Yet another Decline
and Fall may remain to be written, another and another, and it may be
another, before the World State comes and Peace.
Yet against this prospect of a dispersal of will, of a secular decline
in honor, education, public spirit, and confidence, of a secular
intensification of corruption, lawlessness, and disorder, I do, with
a confidence that waxes and wanes, balance the creative spirit in
America, and that kindred spirit that for me finds its best symbol in
the President's kneeling, gesticulating figure, and his urgent "The
effort's worth it!" Who can gauge the far-reaching influence of even
the science we have, in ordering and quickening the imagination of
man, in enhancing and assuring their powers? Common men feel secure
to-day in enterprises it needed men of genius to conceive in former
times. And there is a literature--for all our faults we do write more
widely, deeply, disinterestedly, more freely and frankly than any set
of writers ever did before--reaching incalculable masses of readers,
and embodying an amount of common consciousness and purpose beyond
all precedent. Consider only how nowadays the problems that were once
the inaccessible thoughts of statesmen may be envisaged by common
men! Here am I really able, in a few weeks of observant work, to get
a picture of America. I publish it. If it bears a likeness, it will
live and be of use; if not it will die, and be no irreparable loss.
Some fragment, some suggestion may survive. My friend Mr. F. Madox
Hueffer was here a day or so ago to say good-bye; he starts for America
as I write here, to get _his_ vision. As I have been writing these
papers I have also been reading, instalment by instalment, the subtle,
fine renderings of America revisited by Mr. Henry James. We work in
shoals, great and small together, one trial thought following another.
We are getting the world presented. It is not simply America that we
swarm over and build up into a conceivable process, into something
understandable and negotiable by the mind. I find on my desk here
waiting for me a most illuminating _Vision of India_, in which Mr.
Sidney Low, with a marvellous aptitude, has interpreted east to west.
Besides my poor superficialities in _The Tribune_ appears Sir William
Butler, with a livid frankness expounding the most intimate aspects
of the South African situation. A friend who called to-day spoke of
Nevinson's raid upon the slave trade of Portuguese East Africa, and
of two irrepressible writers upon the Congo crimes. I have already
mentioned the economic and social literature, the so-called literature
of exposure in America. This altogether represents collectively a
tremendous illumination. No social development was ever so lit and
seen before. Collectively, this literature of facts and theories and
impressions is of immense importance. Things are done in the light,
more and more are they done in the light. The world perceives and
thinks....
After all is said and done, I do find the balance of my mind tilts
steadily to a belief in a continuing and accelerated progress now in
human affairs. And in spite of my patriotic inclinations, in spite,
too, of the present high intelligence and efficiency of Germany, it
seems to me that in America, by sheer virtue of its size, its free
traditions, and the habit of initiative in its people, the leadership
of progress must ultimately rest. Things like the Chicago scandals,
the insurance scandals, and all the manifest crudities of the American
spectacle, don't seem to me to be more than relatively trivial after
all. There are the universities, the turbines of Niagara, the New York
architecture, and the quality of the mediocre people to set against
these....
Within a week after I saw the President I was on the _Umbria_ and
steaming slowly through the long spectacle of that harbor which was my
first impression of America, which still, to my imagination, stands so
largely for America. The crowded ferry-boats hooted past; athwart the
shining water, tugs clamored to and fro. The sky-scrapers raised their
slender masses heavenward--America's gay bunting lit the scene. As we
dropped down I had a last glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge. There to the
right was Ellis Island, where the immigrants, minute by minute, drip
and drip into America, and beyond that the tall spike-headed Liberty
with the reluctant torch, which I have sought to make the centre of
all this writing. And suddenly as I looked back at the sky-scrapers
of lower New York a queer fancy sprang into my head. They reminded me
quite irresistibly of piled-up packing cases outside a warehouse. I
was amazed I had not seen the resemblance before. I could really have
believed for a moment that that was what they were, and that presently
out of these would come the real thing, palaces and noble places, free,
high circumstances, and space and leisure, light and fine living for
the sons of men....
Ocean, cities, multitudes, long journeys, mountains, lakes as large as
seas, and the riddle of a nation's destiny; I've done my impertinent
best now with this monstrous insoluble problem. I finish.
The air is very warm and pleasant in my garden to-night, the sunset has
left a rim of greenish-gold about the northward sky, shading up a blue
that is, as yet, scarce pierced by any star. I write down these last
words here, and then I shall step through the window and sit out there
in the kindly twilight, now quiet, now gossiping idly of what so-and-so
has done while I have been away, of personal motives and of little
incidents and entertaining intimate things.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Future in America, by Herbert George Wells