John Hay
was as strange to the Mississippi River as though he had not been
bred on its shores, and the city of St. Louis had turned its back
on the noblest work of nature, leaving it bankrupt between its
own banks. The new American showed his parentage proudly; he was
the child of steam and the brother of the dynamo, and already,
within less than thirty years, this mass of mixed humanities,
brought together by steam, was squeezed and welded into approach
to shape; a product of so much mechanical power, and bearing no
distinctive marks but that of its pressure. The new American,
like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the
European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church,
and the features would follow the parentage.
The St. Louis Exposition was its first creation in the
twentieth century, and, for that reason, acutely interesting. One
saw here a third-rate town of half-a-million people without
history, education, unity, or art, and with little capital --
without even an element of natural interest except the river
which it studiously ignored -- but doing what London, Paris, or
New York would have shrunk from attempting. This new social
conglomerate, with no tie but its steam-power and not much of
that, threw away thirty or forty million dollars on a pageant as
ephemeral as a stage flat.
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