“The Lusitania has been torpedoed,” he said, in a quiet voice, “without warning. Hundreds of Americans are lost—women and children.” He stopped and repeated the last words. “Women and children.” For a moment he stood motionless.... “It means war,” he said.
Every eye was on him. He held them. He stopped them as if they had been so many clocks with their hands pointing to this fateful hour. He made them feel the event.
Nobody spoke. Potter turned very slowly and surveyed the room, then, still very slowly, he walked out of the room without a word or a nod. His stein was left, scarcely touched, before his chair.
CHAPTER II
Potter Waite stood a moment at the curb beside his car, looking at the heart of this great new city. At his right, Cadillac Square stretched broadly away to the County Building’s square tower. Within his memory this handsome space had been a public market, unsightly, evil of odor, reeking with decaying vegetables and the refuse of the meat-stalls. To-day it was overcrowded with parked automobiles. At his left opened the Campus Martius, bisected by the magnificent width of Woodward Avenue. There, on its little irregular plot, squatted the City Hall, shabby, slatternly, forbidding. It seemed, against the background, the palisade, of upreaching sky-scrapers of terra-cotta and brick, to typify that thing we tolerate as municipal government. As was the shabby building to its clean, its magnificent, neighbors, so was the thing it contained—the government of a great city—to the governments of private enterprises which had made that city a place to excite the envious admiration of her sister municipalities.
Potter frowned at the thought. The huge machine of government was made up of such parts, of common councils, of mayors, of state legislatures, of national legislatures, differing only in degree, but wrought of kindred materials. It was this machine with which the country would make war.
“It won’t work,” Potter said to himself. “It hasn’t the stroke or the bore....”
He stood still looking at the teeming Campus, following its currents and cross-currents and eddies with eyes darkened by thought. It was a current worthy to pass between magnificent banks. The sidewalks eddied with never-motionless men and women; with human beings whose errands hurried them on. Potter studied them with interest. Their faces were mobile, alert, intelligent, forceful. There was a capability about each individual; there was something distinct about each atom in the crowd.... Here, after all, was the great machine of government. Here was that from which government derived; here was that which would make war, which would fight the war. Walking down that street was a potential army, and the mothers of a potential army.
It was these who had made possible, who had created, the terra-cotta sky-scrapers; it was these who had made possible that marvelous procession of automobiles which taxed the width of Woodward Avenue; it was these who had made possible the building up of that miracle of industrial life that stretched around the town like fortifications around some European city—but fortifications holding the city safe, not from a foreign invader, but from an economic invader. Factory-fortresses preserving the prosperity of the town.
He continued to eye the crowd, and his eyes became less deep and dark. He raised his head without knowing that he raised it. A feeling of pride was upon him.