It was a young chemist trained in
Europe who conducted me through the mills, explaining all the processes in
a perfect idiomatic speech, though of broken accent.
The white-hot steel ingot swinging beneath a smoky sky is a sign of the
contribution of France through Pittsburgh to civilization, not merely the
material but the human contribution. The ingot, a great block of white-hot
steel, is the sign of her labor, which has assembled the scattered
elements of the valley and, in the fierce heat of natural and unfed fires,
has compounded them into a new metal that is something more than iron,
more valuable than gold. But it is only another sign, too, of forces that
have assembled from all parts of the earth, men represented in the varied
cargoes that are poured by a seemingly omnipotent hand into those
furnaces--red-blooded men, and with them slag that has gone through the
fires of older civilizations.
Here, let me say again, is being made a new metal; this no one can doubt.
It is not merely a melting and a restamping of old coin with a new
superscription, a new sovereignty--a composite face instead of a personal
likeness--it is the making, as I have said in other illustrations and
metaphors, of a new race.
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