All these
things upon the hills are by-products of the steel-mills down in the
ravine. In every luminous ingot swung in the mills that were his, there is
something toward the pension of a university professor out in Oregon,
something for an artist in New York or Paris, something for an astronomer
on the top of Mount Wilson, something for the teacher in the school upon
the hill, something for every library established by his gift.
What is now making itself felt, however, is a desire to get the wage
element in the ingot as thriftily, as efficiently, as nobly converted and
used to the last ounce as is the profit element. There has been in the
past a masterful individualism at work. Now there is a masterful
aggressive humanism beginning to make itself felt, comparable in its
spirit with the masterful venturing of the French explorers or the
masterful faith of the French missionaries, that promises to constrain the
city "to the saving and enhancing of individual and collective human
power," even as the French missionaries tried to constrain the great fur-
trading prospects of France to the saving of human souls.
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