That there is a strong utilitarian spirit possessing all the valley I do not deny. But I often wonder whether we are not conventionally astigmatic to much of the beauty and moral value of such utilitarian life and its disciplines. There is intimation of this in a recent statement of a western economist to the effect that there was as great cultural value in developing the lines of a perfect milk cow as in studying a Venus de Milo, and in growing a perfect ear of corn as in representing it by means of color or expressing the rhythm of its growth in metered words. But, I believe that there is as much beauty and poetry there as among the isles of Greece, if only it were interpreted by the disinterested spirit and skill of the artist, the scholar, and the poet.
If we turn for a moment to the precursors who have led the way to the valley that lies beneath, the valley of the strata of coal and iron, with its subterranean streams of precious metal, its currents of gold and silver, and its lakes of oil and gas, and from these precursors to the producers and transporters who have led these elements forth to the uses of man, we shall find a like story—another chapter of democracy's dreaming of kings.
The same author whom I have quoted liberally above has written what he calls "The Romance of Steel" in that valley. It begins with an Englishman of French ancestry, Bessemer, and one Kelly, an Irish-American, born on the old Fort Duquesne point. They had discovered and developed, each without the knowledge of the other, the pneumatic process of treating iron—that is, of refining it with air and making steel. Bessemer's name became associated with the process. But the industry has made Kelly's birthplace, the site of the old French fort, its capital (with another of those poetic fitnesses that multiply as we put the present against the past).
France not only gave to Pittsburgh her site but the crucibles in which her fortunes lay. Bessemer was the son of a French artist living in London in poverty. Young Bessemer had invented many devices, when Napoleon III, one day in a conversation, complained to him that the metal used in making cannon was of poor quality and expensive. He began experiments in London at the Emperor's suggestion and later sent the Emperor a toy cannon of his own making. It was in this experimenting, as I infer, that the idea struck him of making malleable iron by introducing air into the fluid metal. But his first experiments were not particularly encouraging, and when he read a paper on the process of manufacturing steel without fuel before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it is said that every British steelmaker roared with laughter at the "crazy Frenchman" and that it was voted not to mention his silly paper in the minutes of the association. [Footnote: "On the 13th of August, 1856, the author had the honor of reading a paper before the mechanical section of the British Association at Cheltenham. This paper, entitled 'The Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel,' was the first account that appeared shadowing forth the important manufacture now generally known as the Bessemer process.
"It was only through the earnest solicitation of Mr. George Rennie, the then president of the mechanical section of this association, that the invention was, at that early stage of its development, thus prominently brought forward; and when the author reflects on the amount of labor and expenditure of time and money that were found to be still necessary before any commercial results from the working of the process were obtained, he has no doubt whatever but that, if the paper at Cheltenham had not then been read, the important system of manufacture to which it gave rise would to this hour have been wholly unknown."
Henry Bessemer, "On the Manufacture of Cast Steel: Its Progress and
Employment as a Substitute for Wrought Iron." British Association for the
Advancement of Science, Report, 1865. Mechanical Science Section, pp. 165-
6.]
To-day, on the same authority, "there are more than a hundred Bessemer converters in the United States," and they "breathe iron into steel at the rate of eighteen billion pounds a year"—"two and a quarter millions of pounds every hour of the day and night."
With their companion open-hearth converters and attendant furnaces and mills, they not only hold the site of the old fort but make a circle of glowing fortresses around the valley—in Buffalo, in Birmingham, Alabama, and in the "red crags" of the Rockies at Pueblo, beneath Pike's Peak. And within ten years a whole new city, [Footnote: Gary, Indiana.] not far from Chicago, on Lake Michigan, has been made to order. A river was turned from its course, a town was moved, and an entirely new city was constructed with homes for nearly twenty thousand workmen near a square mile of furnaces and mills.
The attention of the world has been centred upon the millionaires whom this mighty trade has made. The very book which I have quoted so literally carries as its luring subtitle, "The Story of a Thousand Millionaires." "A huge, exclusive preoccupation with dollar-getting," says H. G. Wells. But an occupation that finds the red earth and the white earth, carries it hundreds of miles to where the coal is stored or the gas is ready to be lighted, assembles the labor from Europe, and converts that red earth, with almost human possibilities, into rails and locomotives (that have together made a republic such as the United States possible), into forty- story buildings and watch-springs, into bridges and mariners' needles, into battle-ships and lancets, into almost every conceivable instrument of human use, can hardly be rightfully called a preoccupation with dollar- getting, though it has brought the perplexing problem that has so much disturbed the hopes of democracy, dreaming of such masterful children, producers, and poets, yet dreading the very inequalities that their energies create.
There comes constantly the question as to how all this initiative which has been so titanic is to be reconciled with the general good—a world- wide and insistent problem, which will be more serious there when the neighborliness is not so intimate. But the new neighborly element will be found, we must believe, as an element has been found for the strengthening of steel.