And if there
were no Eskimos nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth
might furnish failed to swim and bubble in this crucible?
With Bigness came the new machinery and the rush; the streets began
to roar and rattle, the houses to tremble; the pavements were worn
under the tread of hurrying multitudes. The old, leisurely, quizzical
look of the faces was lost in something harder and warier; and a
cockney type began to emerge discernibly--a cynical young mongrel
barbaric of feature, muscular and cunning; dressed in good fabrics
fashioned apparently in imitation of the sketches drawn by newspaper
comedians. The female of his kind came with him--a pale girl, shoddy
and a little rouged; and they communicated in a nasal argot, mainly
insolences and elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people showed
change: in place of the old midland vernacular, irregular but clean,
and not unwholesomely drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors
began to be heard, held together by GUNNAS and GOTTAS and much
fostered by the public journals.
The city piled itself high in the center, tower on tower for a
nucleus, and spread itself out over the plain, mile after mile; and
in its vitals, like benevolent bacilli contending with malevolent in
the body of a man, missions and refuges offered what resistance they
might to the saloons and all the hells that cities house and shelter.
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