It yet remains to be seen whether this can be done. Perhaps even the hope of it came from an inadequate knowledge of how vast a region they had entered, and how incalculable its wealth. Perhaps it was too much to expect that any one city, however situated, however connected, however developed, should be able to absorb or even to control the development of that region and the distribution of its resources to all points of the land. It suggests the idea of a single woodpecker's hoping to carry off the cherries from a tree which a noble company of cats and jays and other birds were watching; or of a family of squirrels who should take up their abode in a certain hole with the idea of eating all the walnuts in a forest. But however this may turn out, these Englishmen, having once set before themselves their aim, have never swerved from trying to attain it; and they are at work developing their city with the hope that it will bring as great a change in the steel market of the United States as a few years ago was made in the iron market by the manufacture of Southern iron. If you take up in detail the working out of their plan of development, it is the same--no stint, no drawing back or swerving aside, no abatement of the greatest intentions. They must have a site for their city--they choose for this site what with entire truthfulness may be called one of the most strategic mountain passes in American history. They must have a name--they choose that of the principal seat of the English iron trade. They must have a plant for the manufacture of steel by the basic process--they promise it shall be the largest in the United States. They want a tannery--it shall be the biggest in the world. A creek has to be straightened to improve drainage--they spend on it a hundred thousand dollars. They will have their mineral resources known--they order a car to be built, stock it with an exposition of their minerals, place it in charge of technical experts, and set it going over the country. They take a notion to establish a casino, sanitarium, and hotel--it must cost over seven hundred thousand dollars. The mountain is in their way--that mighty wall of the Cumberland Mountain which has been in the way of the whole United States for over a hundred years--they remove this mountain; that is, they dig through it a great union tunnel, 3750 feet long, beginning in Kentucky, running under a corner of Virginia, and coming out in Tennessee. Had they done nothing but this, they would have done enough to entitle them to the gratitude of the nation, for it is an event of national importance. It brings the South and the Atlantic seaboard in connection with the Ohio Valley and the Lakes; it does more to make the North and the South one than any other single thing that has happened since the close of the Civil War.