Mechanical industry owes its great development and progress to the work of the woodman and the miner: the first type of worker takes the bent sapling and develops the lathe or “bodger” which is still to be found in the remote parts of the Chiltern Hills in England, while from the mine itself not merely comes the steam engine, first used for pumping out water, but likewise the railway. The perpetual débris amid which the miner lives forms a capital contrast with the ordered culture, the careful weeding and cutting, of field and orchard: almost any sort of habitation is an advance upon the squalor of the pithead; and it is not a mere chance that the era devoted to mining and all its accessory manufactures was throughout the western world the dingiest and dirtiest that has yet befouled the earth. Choked by his own débris, or stirred by the exhaustion of minerals, the miner’s community runs down--and he departs. The name pioneer has a romantic color; but in America the land pioneer mined the forests and the soil, and the industry pioneer almost as ruthlessly mined the human resources, and when the pay-dirt got sallow and thin, they both moved on. Longfellow’s allusion to the “bivouac of life” unconsciously points to the prevailing temper; for even those who remained in the older American centers were affected by the pioneer’s malaise and unsettlement; and they behaved as if at any moment they might be called to the colors and sent westward. Beside the vivid promises of Mechanical Progress and Manifest Destiny the realities of an ordered society thinned into a pale vapor. In many little communities Mechanical Societies were formed for the propagation of the utilitarian faith: industrialism with its ascetic ritual of unsparing work, its practice of thrift, its renunciation of the arts, gathered to itself the religious zeal of Protestantism. The erection of factories, the digging of canals, the location of furnaces, the building of roads, the devising of inventions, not merely exhausted a great part of the available capital; even more, it occupied the energy and imagination of the more vigorous spirits. Two generations before, Thomas Jefferson could lay out and develop the estate of Monticello; now, with many of Jefferson’s capacities, Poe could only dream about the fantastic Domain of Arnheim. The society around Poe had no more use for an architectural imagination than the Puritans had for decorative images; the smoke of the factory-chimney was incense, the scars on the landscape were as the lacerations of a saint, and the mere multiplication of gaunt sheds and barracks was a sign of progress, and therefore an earnest of perfection.