There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and
wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke. The stranger
must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the dirt will be upon
him instantly. It will be upon him and within him, since he must breathe
it, and he may care for no further proof that wealth is here better
loved than cleanliness; but whether he cares or not, the negligently
tended streets incessantly press home the point, and so do the flecked
and grimy citizens. At a breeze he must smother in the whirlpools of
dust, and if he should decline at any time to inhale the smoke he has
the meager alternative of suicide.
The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more
riches. He gets them and pants the fiercer, smelling and swelling
prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained
to one tune: “Wealth! I will get Wealth! I will make Wealth! I will sell
Wealth for more Wealth! My house shall be dirty, my garment shall be
dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he cannot be clean--but I
will get Wealth! There shall be no clean thing about me: my wife shall
be dirty and my child shall be dirty, but I will get Wealth!” And yet it
is not wealth that he is so greedy for: what the giant really wants is
hasty riches. To get these he squanders wealth upon the four winds, for
wealth is in the smoke.
Not so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no
heaving, grimy city; there was but a pleasant big town of neighborly
people who had understanding of one another, being, on the whole, much
of the same type. It was a leisurely and kindly place--“homelike,” it
was called--and when the visitor had been taken through the State Asylum
for the Insane and made to appreciate the view of the cemetery from a
little hill, his host's duty as Baedeker was done. The good burghers
were given to jogging comfortably about in phaetons or in surreys for
a family drive on Sunday. No one was very rich; few were very poor; the
air was clean, and there was time to live.
But there was a spirit abroad in the land, and it was strong here as
elsewhere--a spirit that had moved in the depths of the American soil
and labored there, sweating, till it stirred the surface, rove the
mountains, and emerged, tangible and monstrous, the god of all good
American hearts--Bigness. And that god wrought the panting giant.
In the souls of the burghers there had always been the profound
longing for size. Year by year the longing increased until it became
an accumulated force: We must Grow! We must be Big! We must be Bigger!
Bigness means Money! And the thing began to happen; their longing became
a mighty Will. We must be Bigger! Bigger! Bigger! Get people here! Coax
them here! Bribe them! Swindle them into coming, if you must, but get
them! Shout them into coming! Deafen them into coming! Any kind of
people; all kinds of people! We must be Bigger! Blow! Boost! Brag!
Kill the fault-finder! Scream and bellow to the Most High: Bigness is
patriotism and honor! Bigness is love and life and happiness! Bigness is
Money! We want Bigness!
They got it. From all the states the people came; thinly at first, and
slowly, but faster and faster in thicker and thicker swarms as the quick
years went by. White people came, and black people and brown people
and yellow people; the negroes came from the South by the thousands and
thousands, multiplying by other thousands and thousands faster than
they could die. From the four quarters of the earth the people came,
the broken and the unbroken, the tame and the wild--Germans, Irish,
Italians, Hungarians, Scotch, Welsh, English, French, Swiss, Swedes,
Norwegians, Greeks, Poles, Russian Jews, Dalmatians, Armenians,
Rumanians, Servians, Persians, Syrians, Japanese, Chinese, Turks, and
every hybrid that these could propagate. And if there were no Eskimos
nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth might furnish failed
to swim and bubble in this crucible?
With Bigness came the new machinery and the rush; the streets began to
roar and rattle, the houses to tremble; the pavements were worn under
the tread of hurrying multitudes. The old, leisurely, quizzical look of
the faces was lost in something harder and warier; and a cockney
type began to emerge discernibly--a cynical young mongrel barbaric
of feature, muscular and cunning; dressed in good fabrics fashioned
apparently in imitation of the sketches drawn by newspaper comedians.
The female of his kind came with him--a pale girl, shoddy and a little
rouged; and they communicated in a nasal argot, mainly insolences and
elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people showed change: in
place of the old midland vernacular, irregular but clean, and not
unwholesomely drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors began to
be heard, held together by GUNNAS and GOTTAS and much fostered by the
public journals.
The city piled itself high in the center, tower on tower for a nucleus,
and spread itself out over the plain, mile after mile; and in its
vitals, like benevolent bacilli contending with malevolent in the body
of a man, missions and refuges offered what resistance they might to the
saloons and all the hells that cities house and shelter. Temptation
and ruin were ready commodities on the market for purchase by the
venturesome; highwaymen walked the streets at night and sometimes
killed; snatching thieves were busy everywhere in the dusk; while
house-breakers were a common apprehension and frequent reality. Life
itself was somewhat safer from intentional destruction than it was in
medieval Rome during a faction war--though the Roman murderer was more
like to pay for his deed--but death or mutilation beneath the wheels lay
in ambush at every crossing.
The politicians let the people make all the laws they liked; it did
not matter much, and the taxes went up, which is good for politicians.
Law-making was a pastime of the people; nothing pleased them more.
Singular fermentation of their humor, they even had laws forbidding
dangerous speed. More marvelous still, they had a law forbidding smoke!
They forbade chimneys to smoke and they forbade cigarettes to smoke.
They made laws for all things and forgot them immediately; though
sometimes they would remember after a while, and hurry to make new laws
that the old laws should be enforced--and then forget both new and old.
Wherever enforcement threatened Money or Votes--or wherever it was too
much to bother--it became a joke. Influence was the law.
So the place grew. And it grew strong.
Straightway when he came, each man fell to the same worship:
Give me of thyself, O Bigness:
Power to get more power!
Riches to get more riches!
Give me of thy sweat that I may sweat more!
Give me Bigness to get more Bigness to myself,
O Bigness, for Thine is the Power and the Glory! And
there is no end but Bigness, ever and for ever!