The next day I sent in the resignation of my commission in the regular army of the United States.
Outside the car window, ore piles were visible, black stacks and sooty sheet-iron mills, coal dumps and jagged cuts in the hills against greenness and the meadows and mountains beyond. There were farms, here and there, but they seemed to have been let in by sufferance amid the primary apparatus of the steel-makers.
What an amazingly primary thing steel had become in the civilization we called modern! Steel was the basic industry of America; but, more than that, it was, in a sense, the buttress, the essential frame, rather, of present-day life. It made rails, surgical instruments, the girders of skyscrapers, the tools which cut, bored, and filed all the other tools that made, in their turn, the material basis of our living. It was interesting to think that it contained America's biggest "trust," the greatest example of integration, of financial, of managerial combination, anywhere to be found. Steel was critical in America's future, wasn't it—critical for business, critical for labor?
I met a salesman on the train, who was about to go into business for himself. "I intend to start out on a new tack," he said.
He told me briefly his life-story, and how things were forcing him to start a new enterprise, alone. He was very much excited by the idea. He was going to quit his employer, having been with him twenty-nine years.
"I'm getting a new job myself," I said; "I've just got out of the army."
We both fell into silence, and thought of our own separate futures.
What were a young man's chances in American business to-day? I thought of a book I had just been reading called, "The Age of Big Business." In it was the story of the first captains who saw a vision of immense material development, and with the utmost vigor and hardihood pushed on and marked the leading trails. But apparently the affair had been too roughly done, the structure too crudely wrought: machinery jarred, broke, threatened to bring life down in a rusty heap. "No, you are wrong," I fancied the business leader saying; "it is the agitator who, by dwelling on imaginary ills, has stirred up the masses of mankind."
I gazed out of the window at the black mills as we passed them. I was about to learn the steel business. I knew perfectly well that the men who built this basic structure were as hardy and intelligent—no less and no more so, I hazarded—as this new generation of mine. But the job—difficult technical job though it was—appeared too simple in their eyes. "Build up business, and society will take care of itself," they had said. A partial breakdown, a partial revolution had resulted. Perhaps a thoroughgoing revolution threatened. I didn't know.