e. The harbor had drawn them around it out of the
hum and rush of the country, and here they were in its service, watching
it, studying, planning for its even more stupendous growth. One night I
heard them discuss the idea of moving the East River, making it flow
across Long Island, filling in its old water bed and making New York and
Brooklyn one. They talked of this scheme in a hard-headed Yankee way
that made me forget for the moment its boldness, until some cool remark
opened my eyes to the fact that this change would shift vast
populations, plant millions of people this way and that.

But against these men of the tower, with their wide, deliberate views
ahead, embracing and binding together not only this port but the whole
western world depending upon it, I found in the city jungle innumerable
petty men, who could see only their own narrow interests of to-day, and
who fought blindly any change for a to-morrow--fellows in such mortal
fear of some possible benefit to their rivals that they could see none
for themselves. They were hopelessly used to fighting each other. And I
came to feel that all these men, though many were still young in years,
belonged to a generation gone by, to the age of individual strife that
my father had lived and worked in--and that like him they were all soon
to be swept to one side by the inexorable harbor of to-day, which had no
further use for them.

It needed bigger men. It needed men like Dillon and behind him those
mysterious powers downtown, the men he had called the brains of the
nation, who read the signs of the new times, who saw that the West was
now fast filling up, that the eyes of the nation were once more turning
outward, and that untold resources of wealth were soon to be available
for mighty sea adventures, a vast fleet of Yankee ships that should
drive the surplus output of our teeming industries into all markets of
the world. And the men who saw these things coming were the only ones
who were big enough to prepare the country to meet them. My father's
dream was at last coming true--too late for him to play a part. He had
been but a prophet, a lonely pioneer.

My view of the harbor was different now. I had seen it before as a vast
machine molding the lives of all people around it. But now behind the
machine itself I felt the minds of its molders. I saw its ponderous
masses of freight, its multitudes of people, all pushed and shifted this
way and that by these invisible p