"
Pursuing this course, we were successful. All that any official of the
company required of us was that we be open-minded. The position of the
company, when we came to understand it, was simply that it did not wish
to facilitate the work of men who came down with pencils, paper, and
preconceived "views," deliberately to play the great American game of
"swat the corporation."
* * * * *
Surely there is not in the world an industry which, for sheer pictorial
magnificence, rivals the modern manufacturing of steel. In the first
place, the scale of everything is inexpressibly stupendous. To speak of
a row of six blast furnaces, with mouths a hundred feet above the
ground, and chimneys rising perhaps another hundred feet above these
mouths, is not, perhaps, impressive, but to look at such a row of
furnaces, to see their fodder of ore, dolomite, and coke brought in by
train loads; to see it fed to them by the "skip"; to hear them roar
continually for more; to feel the savage heat generated within their
bodies; to be told in shouts, above the din, something of what is going
on inside these vast, voracious, savage monsters, and to see them
dripping their white-hot blood when they are picked by a long steel bar
in the hands of an atom of a man--this is to witness an almost
terrifying allegory of mankind's achievement.
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