If I had an instinct of human character, such as the intuitive sense of
the fibre and tension of steel possessed by the man who watches the
boiling in the furnaces and who, from time to time, puts aside his smoked
glasses and looks at the texture of a typical bit of his metal, or who
stands at the emptying of the furnace into the ladle and directs the
addition of carbon or magnesium to bring his output to the right
constituency, I could tell you what strains and stresses this new people
would stand. As it is, I can only make a surmise, perhaps not more
valuable than yours.
The makers of steel were concerned only to get the primacy in steel. Human
character was of concern only as it made better steel and more of it. They
took the red ore where they could get it richest in iron and cheapest, and
they took red-blooded labor where they could get it strongest--sinewed,
clearest-eyed, and cheapest. "There are no able-bodied men between the
ages of sixteen and fifty years left in my native town," said a Servian
workman in the mills.
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