XXIV ORE MINES, HIBBING
If one wants an idea of what the Culebra Cut looked like, when the Panama Canal was being dug through the mountains, it is only necessary to go to the ore mines near Duluth. There are the same great terraces, the same steam shovels, digging and loading the dirt, the same engines and trains, and in some of the pits the forms are even fine—amphitheatres,—only the seats and steps are gigantic. But when the shadows begin to creep up from below, the place becomes a theatre for the gods, a theatre where there are no spectators, and the actors are the steam shovels with their white plumes and the engines with their black clouds. But they are finer far than any poor mummer's makeshifts. And every now and then comes a burst of applause as a blast is fired more thrilling than ever heard in a play theatre. This is the theatre of the Wonder of Work.
XXV FLOUR MILLS, MINNEAPOLIS
The mills of Minneapolis are as impressive as the cathedrals of France. There are places on the river where they group themselves into the same compositions, with the bridges below them, that I found years ago at Albi—only the color is different: the rosy red of the French brick is changed to dull concrete gray. The tree masses below are the same, and the old stone railroad bridge over the Mississippi is just as drawable as that over the Tarn. The beauty of the flour mills is the beauty of use—they carry out William Morris's theory that "everything useful should be beautiful"—but I don't know what he would have said to them. There are other subjects which recall Tivoli, where the streams gush out from the bluffs or tumble and rush and roar from dark caverns between the huge modern masses of masonry as finely as they do in far-away Italy. Those were the shrines of the gods—these are the temples of work, the temples of our time.
