And since men of both kinds are more available here than in Europe the steel age walked across the ocean.
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 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.