n an
infinite welter of crates and baskets, boxes, and sacks, crowded the
sidewalks. The gutter was choked with an overflow of refuse cabbage
leaves, soft oranges, decaying beet tops. The air was thick with the
heavy smell of vegetation. Food was trodden under foot, food crammed
the stores and warehouses to bursting. Food mingled with the mud of the
highway. The very dray horses were gorged with an unending nourishment
of snatched mouthfuls picked from backboard, from barrel top, and from
the edge of the sidewalk. The entire locality reeked with the fatness
of a hundred thousand furrows. A land of plenty, the inordinate
abundance of the earth itself emptied itself upon the asphalt and
cobbles of the quarter. It was the Mouth of the City, and drawn from
all directions, over a territory of immense area, this glut of crude
subsistence was sucked in, as if into a rapacious gullet, to feed the
sinews and to nourish the fibres of an immeasurable colossus.

Suddenly the meaning and significance of it all dawned upon Laura. The
Great Grey City, brooking no rival, imposed its dominion upon a reach
of country larger than many a kingdom of the Old World. For, thousands
of miles beyond its confines was its influence felt. Out, far out, far
away in the snow and shadow of Northern Wisconsin forests, axes and
saws bit the bark of century-old trees, stimulated by this city's
energy. Just as far to the southward pick and drill leaped to the
assault of veins of anthracite, moved by her central power. Her force
turned the wheels of harvester and seeder a thousand miles distant in
Iowa and Kansas. Her force spun the screws and propellers of
innumerable squadrons of lake steamers crowding the Sault Sainte Marie.
For her and because of her all the Central States, all the Great
Northwest roared with traffic and industry; sawmills screamed;
factories, their smoke blackening the sky, clashed and flamed; wheels
turned, pistons leaped in their cylinders; cog gripped cog; beltings
clasped the drums of mammoth wheels; and converters of forges belched
into the clouded air their tempest breath of molten steel.

It was Empire, the resistless subjugation of all this central world of
the lakes and the prairies. Here, mid-most in the land, beat the Heart
of the Nation, whence inevitably must come its immeasurable power, its
infinite, infinite, inexhaustible vitality. Here, of all her cities,
throbbed the true life--the true power and spirit of America;