From the end of the new bridge which has replaced the wonderful old wooden ones that got one somehow across the Susquehanna and other American rivers, wandering just at sunset up the beautiful bank of the beautiful river, I found this splendid subject. All, many would say, that was wanted were some knights bringing home fair ladies; all, others would say, was the poor workman, trudging, filled with Millet sentiment, whiskey, or his wrongs, to the filthy hole he is allowed to live in and call his—for the time—home; for these mining towns, the fault of their inhabitants, are pigsties—pigsties that no government in any country in the world but this would permit. It is only in America that immigrants live like hogs—as they like—no government in Europe would permit it. I have seen both hemispheres and know most social reformers have not—and would not know if they had. We are trying to clean up the world before we can clean our back yards. But I only looked at the coal breaker as making, perfecting, carrying out a composition in a glorious landscape, and for that reason I sat down and drew it.
XVII BUILDING A POWER-HOUSE, NIAGARA
The purists and the theorists have made a great fuss about the destruction of the Falls and the vandals who have done it. Now the Falls, I believe, have not been lowered an inch, and as for the power-houses, they are most of them Greek temples, and placed just where the Greeks would have placed them. For once the Greek temple is right in America, and therefore the American purist and theorist doesn't like it—he would not have liked Greek temples had he been Greek. I did not draw the temples, but the temples being built, which was interesting. Below the bridge on the American side are older works, wondrous works, high on the cliffs, great overflows of water gushing from the rock. If they were in Tivoli the purists would sit down between two trains and snapshot the "cute" Villa d'Else and the "hansome" Villa of Hadrian, or revile the spaghetti, while a courier quoted Baedeker at them. At Niagara they take off their clothes, put their feet on the piazza rail of the Canadian hotel, sigh over the power-houses, delight in ginger-ale, and forget the Falls, in the pages of a Saturday Home Magazine. This lithograph is a proof that engineers design to-day for companies, not churches.
XVIII BUILDING A SKYSCRAPER, NEW YORK
This was the end, and a most pictorial end, of the old Everett House, a hotel which had character as so few now have—in New York. I saw it one cold November night and made the sketch on my way to a dinner party in old New York. The dinner waited till I got a sketch done, for I knew the construction man would not. So it was done.