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And it is here that James urges, as his "moral equivalent of war," the conscription of our young men "to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky-scrapers," there to pay "their blood-tax in the immemorial human warfare against nature."
Far-away fields and pastures did not look alluring to this little daughter of the city who put bricks and mortar and lighted streets above trees and meadows, for Amarilly was entirely metropolitan; sky-scrapers were her birthright, and she loved every inch of her city. "But it's best for them," she acknowledged.
The sky-scrapers of to-day are as fireproof as human ingenuity and skill can make them, and this is saying much; in fact, it means that they cannot burn. Of course fires can break out in rooms and apartments in the manufacturing of chemicals or testing experiments, etc., but these are easily confined to narrow limits and readily extinguished with the apparatus at hand.
The citizens of the country dropped the plow, stood their tools in the corner and laid their pens away; the clattering typewriters became silent, and in the offices of the sky-scrapers business came to a stand-still. Only in the factories where war materials were manufactured did great activity reign. For the present there was at least one dim hope left, namely the fleet. But where was the fleet?
Sky-scrapers are indicative of the heights to which we are aspiring; to which we are climbing; air-ships only tell us that man in his interior nature in his reality is not a creeping, crawling Thing, chained to the earth. He may, if he will, soar into ethereal realms. He has wings, and if he so desires, he may use them.
Its spire falls not more than a hundred feet below the surrounding sky-scrapers, and were it not for its graveyard it might escape notice. Now its graveyard is one of the wonders of America. Rich in memories of colonial days, it is as lucid a piece of history as survives within the boundaries of New York.
He is touching at first, inevitably quite juvenile, in the measure of his good faith; we feel him not a little lost and lonely and stranded in the New York pandemonium obliged to throw himself upon sky-scrapers and the overspread blackness pricked out in a flickering fury of imaged advertisement for want of some more interesting view of character and manners.
They sank down until they were on a level with the top of one of those extraordinary sky-scrapers. The roof seemed perfectly flat, except for a large, round, black opening in its center. No one was in sight. When opposite the upper row of windows, at a distance of perhaps twenty feet, Smith brought the car to a halt, and they peered in.
Kelly's nightstick got his pneumonia gas jet, or whatever you call it. He's still quiet, in the station house You know old man Van Cleft, who owns sky-scrapers down town, don't you? Well, he's the center of this flying wedge of excitement. His family are fine people, I understand. His daughter was to be married next week.
Then greyness, broken by these patches of misty colour, settles into the lower channels of the New York streets; while the upper heights of the sky-scrapers, clear of the roofs, are still lit on the sunward side with a mellow glow, curiously serene. To the man in the mirk of the street, they seem to exude this light from the great spaces of brick.
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