They
knew enough to know that their world was one of energies quite
new.
All this, the newcomer understood and accepted, since he could
not help himself and saw that the American could help himself as
little as the newcomer; but the fact remained that the more he
knew, the less he was educated. Society knew as much as this, and
seemed rather inclined to boast of it, at least on the stump; but
the leaders of industry betrayed no sentiment, popular or other.
They used, without qualm, whatever instruments they found at
hand. They had been obliged, in 1861, to turn aside and waste
immense energy in settling what had been settled a thousand years
before, and should never have been revived. At prodigious
expense, by sheer force, they broke resistance down, leaving
everything but the mere fact of power untouched, since nothing
else had a solution. Race and thought were beyond reach. Having
cleared its path so far, society went back to its work, and threw
itself on that which stood first -- its roads. The field was
vast; altogether beyond its power to control offhand; and society
dropped every thought of dealing with anything more than the
single fraction called a railway system. This relatively small
part of its task was still so big as to need the energies of a
generation, for it required all the new machinery to be created
-- capital, banks, mines, furnaces, shops, power-houses,
technical knowledge, mechanical population, together with a
steady remodelling of social and political habits, ideas, and
institutions to fit the new scale and suit the new conditions.
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