epoch, were in
their daily detail a time of rejoicing toil; one saw chiefly one's
own share in that, and little of the whole. It is only now that I
look back at it all from these ripe years, from this high tower,
that I see the dramatic sequence of its changes, see the cruel old
confusions of the ancient time become clarified, simplified, and
dissolve and vanish away. Where is that old world now? Where is
London, that somber city of smoke and drifting darkness, full of the
deep roar and haunting music of disorder, with its oily, shining,
mud-rimmed, barge-crowded river, its black pinnacles and blackened
dome, its sad wildernesses of smut-grayed houses, its myriads of
draggled prostitutes, its millions of hurrying clerks? The very
leaves upon its trees were foul with greasy black defilements.
Where is lime-white Paris, with its green and disciplined foliage,
its hard unflinching tastefulness, its smartly organized viciousness,
and the myriads of workers, noisily shod, streaming over the bridges
in the gray cold light of dawn. Where is New York, the high city
of clangor and infuriated energy, wind swept and competition swept,
its huge buildings jostling one another and straining ever upward
for a place in the sky, the fallen pitilessly overshadowed. Where
are its lurking corners of heavy and costly luxury, the shameful
bludgeoning bribing vice of its ill ruled underways, and all the
gaunt extravagant ugliness of its strenuous life? And where now is
Philadelphia, with its innumerable small and isolated homes, and
Chicago with its interminable blood-stained stockyards, its polyglot
underworld of furious discontent.

All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as my native
Potteries and the Black Country have gone, and the lives that were
caught, crippled, starved, and maimed amidst their labyrinths, their
forgotten and neglected maladjustments, and their vast, inhuman,
ill-conceived industrial machinery have escaped--to life. Those
cities of growth and accident are altogether gone, never a chimney
smokes about our world to-day, and the sound of the weeping of
children who toiled and hungered, the dull despair of overburdened
women, the noise of brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasures
and all the ugly grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them,
with the utter change in our lives. As I look back into the past
I see a vast exultant dust of house-breaking and removal rise
up into the clear air that follow