I was told by a chemist, when visiting the mills in Pittsburgh, that every steelmaker knows that a little titanium mixed with the molten iron after its boiling in air multiplies its tensile strength immeasurably, though no one knows just why it is so. Perhaps, in the plans for the new cities of Pittsburgh and Chicago, we have sign of the social titanium that will increase the tensile strength of democracy in the places where the stress and strain are greatest.
But my concern just now is that the reader shall see how the valley first explored by the French has given and is giving bread to the world, and has postponed the dread augury of the Malthusian doctrine; how the larger valley of the explorers of the lens and crucible, Lavoisier and Berthelot, is opening into infinite distances; and how the under valley, when breathed upon by the air, has given its wealth to the over valley—and through this all to realize that France's geographical descendants are out of those three valleys evoking, making, a new world.
For they are a people of makers—of new-age poets, not mere workers glorying in the shafts of their goads, wakeful to adorn their work and keep clean the furnace, and making their "craft their prayer" (an impossibility in these days of the high division of labor) but rough, noisy, grimy, braggart creators, caring not for the straightness of the furrow unless it produces more, the beauty of the goad unless it promotes speed, the cleanliness of the furnace unless it increases the output, or the craft itself; but only of the product, the thing led forth, and its value to the world. If so much is said of the dollar, it is because the dollar is the kilowatt, the measure of the product. And while we have not yet found the ideal way of distributing what has been led forth, do not let that fact obscure the world service of these new-world Prometheans, who have carried the fire to a mortal use which even the gods of Greece could not have imagined and have turned the air itself into fuel to feed it.
A young man, born son of a stone-mason in that valley, who has been successively a student, clerk, lawyer, solicitor-general of a great railroad, its president, and later the head of an industry that is carrying electricity over the world, said to me not long ago that he was building a trolley-line in Rome. It seemed a profanation. But if the titular function of the official who holds the highest spiritual office there was once the care of bridges (Pontifex Maximus), will the higher utilization of those bridges not be some day made as poetic, as spiritual, as high a function of state and society?
I see that son of the stone-mason, with blanched face and set jaw, facing and quelling a body of strikers threatening to tear up the tracks along the Chicago River, as brave as Horatius at the bridge across the Tiber. There is a vivid picture of democracy's greatest problem in that valley. Then I see him flinging almost in a day a new bridge across the Tiber. There is a companion picture, a gleam of democracy's poesy.
One writing of the habitants of one of those smoky valley cities said: "They are not below poetry but above it." Rather are they making it— rough, virile, formless, rhymeless. It reminds me of some of Walt Whitman's verses that at first seem but catalogues of homely objects on his horizon but that by and by are singing, in some rough rhythm, a song that stirs one's blood.
Oil of rocks, led from cisterns in the valley, that Bonnecamp found so dark and gloomy on the Céloron journey, to the lamp of the academician and the peasant; wheat from millions of age-long fallow acres to keep the world from fear of hunger; flour from the grinding of the mills of the saint to whom La Salle prayed; wagons, sewing-machines, ploughs, harvesters from the places of the portages; bridges, steel rails, cars, ready-made structures of twenty stories from the places of the forts; unheard-of fruits from the trees of the new garden of the Hesperides (under the magic of such as Burbank); flowers from wildernesses! Would Whitman were come back to put all together into a song of the valley that should acquaint our ears with that rugged music-that rugged music wakened by the plash of the paddle and the swirl of the water in the wake of the Frenchman's canoe! As he is not, I can only wish that you who have read these chapters may have intimation of it, as not long ago in New York, standing before a rough, unsightly, entirely isolate frame in a university corridor—where there were heard normally only the noises of closing doors and shuffling feet—I put a receiver to my ears and heard, in the midst of these nearer, every-day noises, some distant cello whose vibrations were but waiting in the air to be heard. Some said there was but the slamming of doors, but I had evidence of my own ears that the music was there. I have not imagined this song of the valley, nor have I improvised it. Its vibrations which I myself feel are but transmitted as best an imperfect, detached frame in the midst of other sounds and interests can.
CHAPTER XVII
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW
The clearing in the forest for the log schoolhouse where Lincoln got his only formal schooling illustrates the beginning of the field of public provision for culture, a territory then made up in that valley largely of the white acres set apart from the domain of Louis XIV for the maintenance of public schools. I can tell you out of my own experience how meagre that provision was. Out on the open prairie a frame building—the successor of the log cabin—was built. I think the ground on which it stood had never been ploughed. I remember hearing, as if yesterday, a farmer's boy reciting in it one day what we thought a piece of lasting eloquence: "Not many generations ago where you now sit encircled by all the embellishments of life, the wild fox dug his hole unscared and the Indian hunter pursued the panting deer; here lived and learned another race of beings"—little realizing that, except in the encircling embellishments, we were sitting on such a site, and that we were the "new race of beings" and much nearer to the stone-age man than were they who built the ancient wall just back of the Pantheon in Paris.