One might compare Detroit to a demure village girl, pleasing, beautiful, growing up with no other thought than to become a wife and mother, when, by chance, some great impresario hears her singing about her work and it is discovered that she has one of the world's rarest voices. From her the old things and the old thoughts and the old habits of life are gone forever. The world pours wealth and admiration at her feet and her name rings from continent to continent. So with the lovely old city, straggling along the shores of that inland strait. She has become a prima donna among cities. The old identity is gone, replaced by something else, less homely, but mightier, grander. Her population, which, within the memory of boys not out of high-school, numbered less than three hundred thousand souls, was now reported to be thrice that, and, by the optimistic, even more. Her wealth has not doubled or trebled, but multiplied by an unbelievable figure, and she has spent it with unbelievable lavishness. Where once were cobblestone pavements and horse-cars are countless swarms of automobiles; where once were meadows, pastures, wood-lots, are tremendous plants employing armies of men, covering scores of acres, turning out annual products which bring to the city hundreds of millions of dollars. In the history of the world no city has come into such a fortune as Detroit, nor has there been such universal prosperity, not to employer alone, but to employees, and to the least of employees. It seemed as if the day had arrived when one asked, not where he should get money, but what he should do with his money. So Detroit spent! It built magnificent hotels; it created palaces for its millionaires, and miles upon miles of homes--luxurious, costly homes for those whose handsome salaries passed the dreams of their youth, or whose fortunes, built up by contact with the trade of purveying automobiles to an eager world, had not even been hoped for ten years before. Even the laborer had his home. Why not, when one manufacturer paid to the man who swept his floors the minimum wage of five dollars a day? That was before the war, before a solemn covenant became a scrap of paper and the world fell sick of its most horrible disease. Then Detroit was rich, was spending lavishly but not insanely. With the coming of war there was a halt, a fright, a retrenchment, a hesitation, for no man knew what the next day might bring. But as the next day brought no disaster, as it became apparent that the coming days were to bring something quite different from disaster, Detroit went ahead gaily. Then came strangers from abroad, speaking other languages than ours, and men began to whisper that this plant had a ten-million-dollar contract from Russia for shrapnel fuses; this other plant a twenty-million-dollar contract for trucks; this other a fabulous arrangement for manufacturing this or that bit of the devil's prescription for slaughtering men--and the whispers proved true.