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 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[291] 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.
