Wells, saw as he left that city only a
"great industrial desolation" netted by railroads. He smelled an
unwholesome reek from the stock-yards, and saw a bituminous reek that
outdoes London, with vast chimneys right and left, "huge blackened grain-
elevators, flame-crowned furnaces, and gauntly ugly and filthy factory
buildings, monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots, littered with
rusty cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these
are groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses."
[Footnote: H. G. Wells, "Future in America," p. 59.] Nothing but these in
a place whose very smoke was a sign of what had made it possible for the
nations of the earth even to subsist at all in any such numbers, or if at
all, on anything better than black bread.
And, after all, this precursor, this runner before, was but one of
hundreds of later Champlains, Nicolets, and La Salles, in the wake of
whose visions came the producers, those who led forth the corn and wheat
from the furrows, the trees from the forests, the coal from the ground,
the iron from the hills, the steel from the retorts, the fire from the
wells, the water from the mountains, electricity from the clouds and the
cataract--dukes, field-marshals, generals, demigods whom no myth has
enhaloed or poetry immortalized.
Pages:
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495