ng
chess-board of windows. And you begin to realize what a sky-scraper is,
and the poetry of it.

More romantic even than the sky-scraper finished and occupied is the
sky-scraper in process of construction. From no mean height, listening
to the sweet drawl of the steam-drill, I have watched artisans like
dwarfs at work still higher, among knitted steel, seen them balance
themselves nonchalantly astride girders swinging in space, seen them
throwing rivets to one another and never missing one; seen also a huge
crane collapse under an undue strain, and, crumpling like tinfoil,
carelessly drop its load onto the populous sidewalk below. That
particular mishap obviously raised the fear of death among a
considerable number of people, but perhaps only for a moment. Anybody in
America will tell you without a tremor (but with pride) that each story
of a sky-scraper means a life sacrificed. Twenty stories--twenty men
snuffed out; thirty stories--thirty men. A building of some sixty
stories is now going up--sixty corpses, sixty funerals, sixty domestic
hearths to be slowly rearranged, and the registrars alone know how many
widows, orphans, and other loose by-products!

And this mortality, I believe, takes no account of the long battles
that are sometimes fought, but never yet to a finish, in the steel webs
of those upper floors when the labor-unions have a fit of objecting more
violently than usual to non-union labor. In one celebrated building, I
heard, the non-unionists contracted an unfortunate habit of getting
crippled; and three of them were indiscreet enough to put themselves
under a falling girder that killed them, while two witnesses who were
ready to give certain testimony in regard to the mishap vanished
completely out of the world, and have never since been heard of. And so
on. What more natural than that the employers should form a private
association for bringing to a close these interesting hazards? You may
see the leading spirit of the association. You may walk along the street
with him. He knows he is shadowed, and he is quite cheerful about it.
His revolver is always very ready for an emergency. Nobody seems to
regard this state of affairs as odd enough for any prolonged comment.
There it is! It is accepted. It is part of the American dailiness.
Nobody, at any rate in the comfortable clubs, seems even to consider
that the original cause of the warfare is aught but a homicidal
cussedness on the part of the unions.