“What the hell ails you anyhow?” I replied, equally irritable, for we had just been directed by another mounted policeman whose horse had not been frightened by us, to come down in here and see some real tragedy—"The policeman at the last corner told us to come in here."
“Well, you can’t come in. Get out!” and he flicked his boot with his hand in a contemptuous way.
“Ah, go to hell,” I replied angrily, but we had to move just the same. The law in boots and a wide rimmed hat, à la Silver City, was before us.
We got out, cursing the mounted policeman, for who wants to argue with a long, lean, thin-faced, sallow Pennsylvanian armed with a great sixteen shot revolver? God has never been just to me. He has never made me a mounted policeman. As we cruised about in Franklin’s car, looking at all the debris and ruin, I speculated on this problem in ethics and morals or theism or what you will: Why didn’t God stop this flood if he loved these people? Or is there no God or force or intelligence to think about them at all? Why are we here, anyhow? Were there any unjust, or only just among them? Why select Erie when He might have assailed Pittsburg or Broadway and Fortysecond Street, New York, or Philadelphia? Think of what a splendid evidence of judgment that last would have been, or Brooklyn! Oh, God, why not Brooklyn? Why eight people in one house and only one in another and none in many others? Do I seem much too ribald, dear reader? Were the people themselves responsible for not building good barns or culverts or anticipating freshets? Will it come about after a while that every single man will think of the welfare of all other men before he does anything, and so build and so do that no other man will be injured by any action of his? And will every man have the brains (given by God) so to do—or will God prevent freshets and washouts and barns being swept against weak culverts?
I am an honest inquirer. I was asking myself these very questions, wondering over the justice or injustice of life. Do you think there is any such thing as justice, or will you agree with Euripides, as I invariably feel that I must?
“Great treasure halls hath Zeus in heaven,
From whence to man strange dooms are given
Past hope or fear.
And the end looked for cometh not,
And a path is there where no man thought.
So hath it fallen here.”
CHAPTER XXV
CONNEAUT
More splendid lake road beyond Erie, though we were constantly running into detours which took us through sections dreadful to contemplate. The next place of any importance was the city of Conneaut, Ohio, which revealed one form of mechanical advance I had never dreamed existed. Conneaut being “contagious,” as Philosopher Dooley used to say, to the coal fields of Pennsylvania—hard and soft—and incidentally (by water) to the iron and copper mines “up Superior way” in northern Michigan, a kind of transshipping business has sprung up, the coal from these mines being brought here and loaded onto boats for all points on the Great Lakes. Similarly copper and iron coming down from upper Michigan and Wisconsin on boats are here taken out and loaded into cars. I never knew before that iron ore was powdered for shipment—it looks just like a dull red earth—or that they stored it in great hills pending a day of use,—hills which looked to me as though a thousand ships might not lower them in a year. John D. Rockefeller, I am told, was the guiding spirit in all this development here, having first seen the profit and convenience of bringing ore from the mines in northern Michigan south by water to the mills of Pennsylvania and incidentally returning in the same carriers coal to all parts of the Great Lakes and elsewhere. A canny man, that. Won’t some American Homer kindly sing of him as one of the great wonders of the world?
Optically and for a material thrill, the machinery for transshipping these enormous supplies was most interesting to me.
Suppose you were able to take an iron car weighing say thirty or forty thousand pounds, load it with coal weighing thirty or forty thousand pounds more, and turn it up, quite as you would a coal scuttle, and empty the contents into a waiting ship.... Then suppose you looked in the car and saw three or four pieces of coal still lying in it and said to yourself, “Oh, well, I might as well dump these in, too,” and then you lifted up the car and dumped the remaining two or three pieces out—wouldn’t you feel rather strong?