The Turmoil | Page 4

South by the thousands
and thousands, multiplying by other thousands and thousands faster
than they could die. From the four quarters of the earth the people came,
the broken and the unbroken, the tame and the wild-- Germans, Irish,
Italians, Hungarians, Scotch, Welsh, English, French, Swiss, Swedes,
Norwegians, Greeks, Poles, Russian Jews, Dalmatians, Armenians,
Rumanians, Servians, Persians, Syrians, Japanese, Chinese, Turks, and
every hybrid that these could propagate. And if there were no Eskimos
nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth might furnish
failed to swim and bubble in this crucible?
With Bigness came the new machinery and the rush; the streets began
to roar and rattle, the houses to tremble; the pavements were worn
under the tread of hurrying multitudes. The old, leisurely, quizzical
look of the faces was lost in something harder and warier; and a
cockney type began to emerge discernibly--a cynical young mongrel
barbaric of feature, muscular and cunning; dressed in good fabrics
fashioned apparently in imitation of the sketches drawn by newspaper
comedians. The female of his kind came with him--a pale girl, shoddy
and a little rouged; and they communicated in a nasal argot, mainly
insolences and elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people showed
change: in place of the old midland vernacular, irregular but clean, and
not unwholesomely drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors
began to be heard, held together by GUNNAS and GOTTAS and much
fostered by the public journals.
The city piled itself high in the center, tower on tower for a nucleus,
and spread itself out over the plain, mile after mile; and in its vitals,

like benevolent bacilli contending with malevolent in the body of a
man, missions and refuges offered what resistance they might to the
saloons and all the hells that cities house and shelter. Temptation and
ruin were ready commodities on the market for purchase by the
venturesome; highwaymen walked the streets at night and sometimes
killed; snatching thieves were busy everywhere in the dusk; while
house-breakers were a common apprehension and frequent reality. Life
itself was somewhat safer from intentional destruction than it was in
medieval Rome during a faction war--though the Roman murderer was
more like to pay for his deed--but death or mutilation beneath the
wheels lay in ambush at every crossing.
The politicians let the people make all the laws they liked; it did not
matter much, and the taxes went up, which is good for politicians.
Law-making was a pastime of the people; nothing pleased them more.
Singular fermentation of their humor, they even had laws forbidding
dangerous speed. More marvelous still, they had a law forbidding
smoke! They forbade chimneys to smoke and they forbade cigarettes to
smoke. They made laws for all things and forgot them immediately;
though sometimes they would remember after a while, and hurry to
make new laws that the old laws should be enforced--and then forget
both new and old. Wherever enforcement threatened Money or
Votes--or wherever it was too much to bother--it became a joke.
Influence was the law.
So the place grew. And it grew strong. Straightway when he came, each
man fell to the same worship:
Give me of thyself, O Bigness: Power to get more power! Riches to get
more riches! Give me of thy sweat that I may sweat more! Give me
Bigness to get more Bigness to myself, O Bigness, for Thine is the
Power and the Glory! And there is no end but Bigness, ever and for
ever!
The Sheridan Building was the biggest skyscraper; the Sheridan Trust
Company was the biggest of its kind, and Sheridan himself had been
the biggest builder and breaker and truster and buster under the smoke.
He had come from a country cross-roads, at the beginning of the

growth, and he had gone up and down in the booms and relapses of that
period; but each time he went down he rebounded a little higher, until
finally, after a year of overwork and anxiety--the latter not decreased
by a chance, remote but possible, of recuperation from the former in the
penitentiary--he found himself on top, with solid substance under his
feet; and thereafter "played it safe." But his hunger to get was unabated,
for it was in the very bones of him and grew fiercer.
He was the city incarnate. He loved it, calling it God's country, as he
called the smoke Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish. And
when soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it. "It's
good! It's good!" he said, and smacked his lips in gusto. "Good, clean
soot; it's our life-blood, God bless it!" The smoke was one of his great
enthusiasms; he laughed at a committee of plaintive housewives who
called to beg his aid against it. "Smoke's what brings