The French in the Heart of America Part 20

12,000, soil survey.

50,000, hog-cholera serum work.

2,500, orchard demonstration.

10,000, agricultural laboratories.

12,000, animal husbandry.

5,000, dairying.

MONTANA

1912.--$20,000, demonstration of dry-land farming.

1913.--County commissioners may, upon vote of 51 per cent of electors, appropriate $100 per month for agricultural instructor, remainder of salary to be paid by State and United States.

NEBRASKA

1911-12.--$100,000, establishment of school of agriculture.

3,000, agricultural botanical work.

1913-14.--$3,000, agricultural botanical work. County to employ farm demonstrator on pet.i.tion of 10 per cent of farm-land owners.

1,250 (maximum), annually to each accredited high school teaching agriculture, manual training, and home economics.

85,000, for fireproof building for agronomy, horticulture, botany, and entomology.

OHIO

1913.--$229,200, aggregate of station appropriation.

OKLAHOMA

1913.--Counties authorized to appropriate $500 annually for farmers'

demonstration work.

See "American Year Book, 1913," pp. 465-6.

TEXAS

1911.--Authorizing county commissioners' courts to establish experimental farms.

1913.--Railroads may own and operate experimental farms.

WISCONSIN

1913.--Beginning January 1, 1914, $10,000, county agricultural representatives, agricultural development, etc.

WYOMING

1912.--$4,000, agriculture and soil-culture experiments.

1913.--$4,000, experiments along lines of agriculture and soil culture.

5,000, purchase and maintenance of experimental farm.

1914-15.--$5,000, dry-farm experiments.

See "American Year Book, 1913," p. 466.

And nearly every State availed itself by specific act of certain appropriations under a federal grant. In addition to all this, appropriations are generally made for the holding of farmers' inst.i.tutes at which instruction is given by experts and farmers exchange experiences.

The agricultural colleges have a total of over one hundred thousand graduates, men and women, and it is they, and those who follow in increasing numbers, who are to cultivate the valley of Lavoisier and Berthelot even as the pioneers and producers of the past have cultivated for the world the valley of Marquette and La Salle.

It is not all as bright and promising as this rather generalized picture may seem to indicate. There are still isolations, there are bad crops in unfavorable places and untoward seasons. There are human failures. It is an intimation of the darker side that President Roosevelt appointed a commission [Footnote: Commission on Country Life.] a few years ago to see what could be done for the ignorances, the lonesomenesses, the monotonies of country life in America, and to prevent the migration to cities, even as Louis XIV. But all that I have described is there--aggressively, bl.u.s.teringly, optimistically there--and is going most confidently on. It is for the most part a temperate life. All through that valley there has swept a movement, moral, economic, or both, which has closed saloons and prevented the sale of intoxicating drink of any sort in States or communities all the way from the lakes to the gulf.

But, singularly enough, there is promise of a new age of alcohol, I am told. Farmers can distil a variety of alcohol from potatoes at a cost of ten cents a gallon and use it in gasolene engines most profitably, which leads one who has written most informingly and hopefully of the American farmer to foreshadow the day when the farmer "will grow his own power and know how to harness for his own use the omnipotence of the soil" and get its fruits most beneficially distributed.

That there is a strong utilitarian spirit possessing all the valley I do not deny. But I often wonder whether we are not conventionally astigmatic to much of the beauty and moral value of such utilitarian life and its disciplines. There is intimation of this in a recent statement of a western economist to the effect that there was as great cultural value in developing the lines of a perfect milk cow as in studying a Venus de Milo, and in growing a perfect ear of corn as in representing it by means of color or expressing the rhythm of its growth in metered words. But, I believe that there is as much beauty and poetry there as among the isles of Greece, if only it were interpreted by the disinterested spirit and skill of the artist, the scholar, and the poet.

If we turn for a moment to the precursors who have led the way to the valley that lies beneath, the valley of the strata of coal and iron, with its subterranean streams of precious metal, its currents of gold and silver, and its lakes of oil and gas, and from these precursors to the producers and transporters who have led these elements forth to the uses of man, we shall find a like story--another chapter of democracy's dreaming of kings.

The same author whom I have quoted liberally above has written what he calls "The Romance of Steel" in that valley. It begins with an Englishman of French ancestry, Bessemer, and one Kelly, an Irish-American, born on the old Fort Duquesne point. They had discovered and developed, each without the knowledge of the other, the pneumatic process of treating iron--that is, of refining it with air and making steel. Bessemer's name became a.s.sociated with the process. But the industry has made Kelly's birthplace, the site of the old French fort, its capital (with another of those poetic fitnesses that multiply as we put the present against the past).

France not only gave to Pittsburgh her site but the crucibles in which her fortunes lay. Bessemer was the son of a French artist living in London in poverty. Young Bessemer had invented many devices, when Napoleon III, one day in a conversation, complained to him that the metal used in making cannon was of poor quality and expensive. He began experiments in London at the Emperor's suggestion and later sent the Emperor a toy cannon of his own making. It was in this experimenting, as I infer, that the idea struck him of making malleable iron by introducing air into the fluid metal. But his first experiments were not particularly encouraging, and when he read a paper on the process of manufacturing steel without fuel before the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science, it is said that every British steelmaker roared with laughter at the "crazy Frenchman" and that it was voted not to mention his silly paper in the minutes of the a.s.sociation. [Footnote: "On the 13th of August, 1856, the author had the honor of reading a paper before the mechanical section of the British a.s.sociation at Cheltenham. This paper, ent.i.tled 'The Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel,' was the first account that appeared shadowing forth the important manufacture now generally known as the Bessemer process.

"It was only through the earnest solicitation of Mr. George Rennie, the then president of the mechanical section of this a.s.sociation, that the invention was, at that early stage of its development, thus prominently brought forward; and when the author reflects on the amount of labor and expenditure of time and money that were found to be still necessary before any commercial results from the working of the process were obtained, he has no doubt whatever but that, if the paper at Cheltenham had not then been read, the important system of manufacture to which it gave rise would to this hour have been wholly unknown."

Henry Bessemer, "On the Manufacture of Cast Steel: Its Progress and Employment as a Subst.i.tute for Wrought Iron." British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science, Report, 1865. Mechanical Science Section, pp. 165- 6.]

To-day, on the same authority, "there are more than a hundred Bessemer converters in the United States," and they "breathe iron into steel at the rate of eighteen billion pounds a year"--"two and a quarter millions of pounds every hour of the day and night."

With their companion open-hearth converters and attendant furnaces and mills, they not only hold the site of the old fort but make a circle of glowing fortresses around the valley--in Buffalo, in Birmingham, Alabama, and in the "red crags" of the Rockies at Pueblo, beneath Pike's Peak. And within ten years a whole new city, [Footnote: Gary, Indiana.] not far from Chicago, on Lake Michigan, has been made to order. A river was turned from its course, a town was moved, and an entirely new city was constructed with homes for nearly twenty thousand workmen near a square mile of furnaces and mills.

The attention of the world has been centred upon the millionaires whom this mighty trade has made. The very book which I have quoted so literally carries as its luring subt.i.tle, "The Story of a Thousand Millionaires." "A huge, exclusive preoccupation with dollar-getting," says H. G. Wells. But an occupation that finds the red earth and the white earth, carries it hundreds of miles to where the coal is stored or the gas is ready to be lighted, a.s.sembles the labor from Europe, and converts that red earth, with almost human possibilities, into rails and locomotives (that have together made a republic such as the United States possible), into forty- story buildings and watch-springs, into bridges and mariners' needles, into battle-ships and lancets, into almost every conceivable instrument of human use, can hardly be rightfully called a preoccupation with dollar- getting, though it has brought the perplexing problem that has so much disturbed the hopes of democracy, dreaming of such masterful children, producers, and poets, yet dreading the very inequalities that their energies create.

There comes constantly the question as to how all this initiative which has been so t.i.tanic is to be reconciled with the general good--a world- wide and insistent problem, which will be more serious there when the neighborliness is not so intimate. But the new neighborly element will be found, we must believe, as an element has been found for the strengthening of steel.

I was told by a chemist, when visiting the mills in Pittsburgh, that every steelmaker knows that a little t.i.tanium mixed with the molten iron after its boiling in air multiplies its tensile strength immeasurably, though no one knows just why it is so. Perhaps, in the plans for the new cities of Pittsburgh and Chicago, we have sign of the social t.i.tanium that will increase the tensile strength of democracy in the places where the stress and strain are greatest.

But my concern just now is that the reader shall see how the valley first explored by the French has given and is giving bread to the world, and has postponed the dread augury of the Malthusian doctrine; how the larger valley of the explorers of the lens and crucible, Lavoisier and Berthelot, is opening into infinite distances; and how the under valley, when breathed upon by the air, has given its wealth to the over valley--and through this all to realize that France's geographical descendants are out of those three valleys evoking, making, a new world.

For they are a people of makers--of new-age poets, not mere workers glorying in the shafts of their goads, wakeful to adorn their work and keep clean the furnace, and making their "craft their prayer" (an impossibility in these days of the high division of labor) but rough, noisy, grimy, braggart creators, caring not for the straightness of the furrow unless it produces more, the beauty of the goad unless it promotes speed, the cleanliness of the furnace unless it increases the output, or the craft itself; but only of the product, the thing led forth, and its value to the world. If so much is said of the dollar, it is because the dollar is the kilowatt, the measure of the product. And while we have not yet found the ideal way of distributing what has been led forth, do not let that fact obscure the world service of these new-world Prometheans, who have carried the fire to a mortal use which even the G.o.ds of Greece could not have imagined and have turned the air itself into fuel to feed it.

A young man, born son of a stone-mason in that valley, who has been successively a student, clerk, lawyer, solicitor-general of a great railroad, its president, and later the head of an industry that is carrying electricity over the world, said to me not long ago that he was building a trolley-line in Rome. It seemed a profanation. But if the t.i.tular function of the official who holds the highest spiritual office there was once the care of bridges (Pontifex Maximus), will the higher utilization of those bridges not be some day made as poetic, as spiritual, as high a function of state and society?

I see that son of the stone-mason, with blanched face and set jaw, facing and quelling a body of strikers threatening to tear up the tracks along the Chicago River, as brave as Horatius at the bridge across the Tiber.

There is a vivid picture of democracy's greatest problem in that valley.

Then I see him flinging almost in a day a new bridge across the Tiber.

There is a companion picture, a gleam of democracy's poesy.

One writing of the habitants of one of those smoky valley cities said: "They are not below poetry but above it." Rather are they making it-- rough, virile, formless, rhymeless. It reminds me of some of Walt Whitman's verses that at first seem but catalogues of homely objects on his horizon but that by and by are singing, in some rough rhythm, a song that stirs one's blood.

Oil of rocks, led from cisterns in the valley, that Bonnecamp found so dark and gloomy on the Celoron journey, to the lamp of the academician and the peasant; wheat from millions of age-long fallow acres to keep the world from fear of hunger; flour from the grinding of the mills of the saint to whom La Salle prayed; wagons, sewing-machines, ploughs, harvesters from the places of the portages; bridges, steel rails, cars, ready-made structures of twenty stories from the places of the forts; unheard-of fruits from the trees of the new garden of the Hesperides (under the magic of such as Burbank); flowers from wildernesses! Would Whitman were come back to put all together into a song of the valley that should acquaint our ears with that rugged music-that rugged music wakened by the plash of the paddle and the swirl of the water in the wake of the Frenchman's canoe! As he is not, I can only wish that you who have read these chapters may have intimation of it, as not long ago in New York, standing before a rough, unsightly, entirely isolate frame in a university corridor--where there were heard normally only the noises of closing doors and shuffling feet--I put a receiver to my ears and heard, in the midst of these nearer, every-day noises, some distant cello whose vibrations were but waiting in the air to be heard. Some said there was but the slamming of doors, but I had evidence of my own ears that the music was there. I have not imagined this song of the valley, nor have I improvised it. Its vibrations which I myself feel are but transmitted as best an imperfect, detached frame in the midst of other sounds and interests can.

CHAPTER XVII

THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW