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[289] 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.
[290]
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 ............