It needed bigger men. It needed men like Dillon and behind him those
mysterious powers downtown, the men he had called the brains of the
nation, who read the signs of the new times, who saw that the West was
now fast filling up, that the eyes of the nation were once more turning
outward, and that untold resources of wealth were soon to be available
for mighty sea adventures, a vast fleet of Yankee ships that should
drive the surplus output of our teeming industries into all markets of
the world. And the men who saw these things coming were the only ones
who were big enough to prepare the country to meet them. My father's
dream was at last coming true--too late for him to play a part. He had
been but a prophet, a lonely pioneer.
My view of the harbor was different now. I had seen it before as a vast
machine molding the lives of all people around it. But now behind the
machine itself I felt the minds of its molders. I saw its ponderous
masses of freight, its multitudes of people, all pushed and shifted this
way and that by these invisible powers. And by degrees I made for myself
a new god, and its name was Efficiency.
Here at last was a god that I felt could stand! I had made so many in
years gone by, I had been making them all my life--from those first
fearful idols, the condors and the cannibals, to the kind old god of
goodness in my mother's church and the radiant goddess of beauty and art
over there in Paris. One by one I had raised them up, and one by one the
harbor had flowed in and dragged them down. But now in my full manhood
(for remember I was twenty-five!) I had found and taken to myself a god
that I felt sure of. No harbor could make it totter and fall. For it was
armed with Science, its feet stood firm on mechanical laws and in its
head were all the brains of all the strong men at the top.
And all the multitudes below seemed mere pigmies to me now. I remember
one late twilight, coming back from a talk with an engineer, I boarded a
ferry at the rush hour and watched the people herd on like sheep. How
small they seemed, how petty their thoughts compared to mine, how blind
their views of the harbor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account