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Editorial «?c!ion e! R»arf$ Smdev American, Atlanta, mav i*. t»n
Man
Nature His Slave
' tgbt, 191J. by the Star Company. Great Britain Rights Referred.
DANA MARSH, one
of whose paintings we re
produce here by permis
sion, has succeeded in put
ting on canvas the real
battle and the real triumph
of men in our century.
That is to say, he has painted the battle
Against Nature, and the triumph over ma
terial difficulties.
Such pictures as Marsh paints should
be hung up in every school, in every li
brary, to make children and grown people
realize what the real fight of men is to
day, AND WHAT THE REAL GLORY
OF THE HUMAN RACE IS TO BE IN
AGES TO COME.
This painting shows one of many giant
steam shovels at work, digging out a great
railroad excavation in the city of New
York.
It shows the leaning monster of steel
ripping up rocks, dirt and sand, every
mouthful filling a wagon, every groaning
and grunting of the engine deepening the
hole and hastening the task.
Only yesterday the work done by this
giant of iron and steam must have been
done painfully by the feeble hands of
men.
Until our day all the work of the world
has been done painfully by men, miser
able slaves attached to the soil, stunted by
labor, bodies merely fed and worked, anc
then worked and fed again, and at last put
away in a shallow grave dug by some
, other working body.
Where a hundred men, getting in each
other’s wav, bending their backs and
wearing themselves out, would have
worked throughout an entire day with
picks and shovels, ONE MAN now sits in
the big steam shovel slave, directs the
work of the monster with a slight move
ment of his hand, and in a minute pulls
up from the earth’s depth into the wagon
huge rocks that men could not lift. Every
minute this monster does a day s work of
half a dozen men. And no one suffers, no
one is tired, no one is driven—science that
found men slaves of each other and afraid
of nature is setting men free, free oi
slavery, free of superstition and terror
AND MAKING NATURE AND HER
POWERS SLAVES OF MAN.
1 i n;u is : id tufcat accomplishment and
glory of this age.
This Reproduction of a Painting by Fred Dana Marsh 9 Illustrates
as No Other Artist Has Done Man’s Conquest of Nature and
Man’s New Power.
The Great Engine Doing Without Pain or Fatigue the Work
That Men Did Slowly and in Sorrow Is the Greatest Triumph and
Hope of the Human Race Today. Here You See Men BEGINNING
to Do Their Work in the Right Way.
You See in the Slave That Works for Them With the Power of
Steam the Agent That Will One Day Conquer the Globe and Set
All Men Free.
Man uses Nature’s forces and conquers
Nature. Only a short time ago Nature’s
forces frightened man.
Civilization must progress in the years
ahead of us with a rapidity inconceivable.
FOR THE MINDS AND THE BODIES
OF MEN ARE SET FREE TO THINK.
While men were physical slaves real
thought w as impossible, except to the rare
man.
Athens was the intellectual centre ot
the world twenty-five centuries ago. be
cause the Athenians employed slaves in
great numbers. Every Athenian citizen
learned to think because he had leisure.
The citizens thought and developed a na
tional intellect that no nation of our day
pretends to equal. The greatest Greek
thinker, Aristotle, said that civilization
and progress could not exist without
slavery—and he was right.
But he did not dream that men one day
would use the giant slave of steel and
steam that you see on this page in Marsh’s
painting.
This century and centuries to follow
will surpass the Athenians in intelligence
and in the possession of slaves.
Our slaves will be of metal, without
nerves. The power of the lightning, of
steam, of the tides and of the great sun it
self will be the power of these slaves of
civilization.
Slave women spun and wove slowly the
clothing of the Athenians and of the
Romans.
Our clothing is made by slave fingers of
steel. Great machines, gigantic looms,
turn out in a day enough to clothe every
citizen of Athens.
The slaves carried their masters in
palanquins in Roman days. Steam and
the lightning are the slaves that carry us
to-day.
Huge fair-skinned captives from Gaul
and Germany did the digging twenty cen
turies ago.
The slave on this page digs for us to
day, and those that worked tied to the
shovel and the pick until yesterday will
soon be free to stand straight AND
THINK, AND BE MEN.
# * *
It was glorious in the old days to see a
strong nobleman’s tower on a hill protect
ing the serfs and slaves at work in the val
ley below. That tower meant that the
poor toilers were protected and kept free
from marauders and from murderers.
It is infinitely more glorious to see a
great factory above a waterfall in our
day, to see the huge power building of Ni
agara sending over copper wires the in
visible electric slaves that work with fear
ful force in cities miles away.
The old tower of the baron freed the
slave from murder and the fear of sudden
death.
The modern industrial tower, and such
servants of man as the great shovel in this
picture, WILL FREE THE HUMAN
SLAVE FROM HIS SLAVERY.
And that wonderful accomplishment of
the human brain, that conquest of Nature
and her powers, that dominion over the
earth accomplished purely by man’s intel
lect. is the great glory and hope of the
human race.
Go to the great steel mill at Gary, in
Indiana, and there you see in wonderful
perfection man’s use of Nature as his
.slave.
The great ships bring the ore down the
lakes. No man’s hand has touched it.
Jaws of steel have torn it from the ore bed
and dropped it into the ships.
At Gary other steel jaws lift it and carry
it to the furnaces.
It is melted and great machines pour it
out. It is 1 divided into huge ingots, and
these, white hot, are carried to the first
part of the rolling mill. Still no man’s
hand has touched that iron. No slave has
toiled under its weight.
The ingot is squeezed by one machine,
made longer and narrower, squeezed
again and made still longer and narrower.
It starts on its journey along the rollers
of the mill, squeezed, pressed, handled,
turned over, and shaped as it travels hun
dreds of yards—no hand touching it.
It arrives at last, a red-hot steel rail, the
right shape, cut the right length. Ma
chinery turns it over, slides it on an in
cline. It has made the journey, changing
from a shapeless ingot to a finished rail,
handled by machinery, the machines
guided and controlled by one or two me
chanics sitting aloft, pressing levers or
buttons, AND WATCHING.
Finished at last and almost readv, the
rail slides down the incline, and for the
first time a man deals with it. He is a
young Scandinavian giant, six and a half
feet tall, with yellow hair and a clear gray
eye. With huge pincers he turns the rail,
and, standing at one end, runs his eye
along it. He is no slave, but a well-paid
worker. Ten dollars a day is his pay for
the use of that true eye. As he looks along
the rail he sees the defects, moves the left
or the right hand, and another man con
trolling the straightening machine
straightens the rail as ordered.
And there you have side by side ten
rails perfectly straight, and more always
coming down the incline to meet the
glance of that gray eye.
# * #
Do tired, hard-worked men come now
to lift these heavy rails and stagger under
their w r eight?
Not at all. They are turning black, but
still too hot for any man’s touch.
A man sitting in his little tower touches
a button, and along overhead rails there
comes gliding a great electric magnet—on
a giant scale—the same as the magnet with
which you used to draw r little tin ducks
across the water.
The magnet slides along, drops down
upon the ten rails that weigh thousands of
pounds, the electrician presses a button,
turns on the current, and man’s electric
slave glues the rails to the magnet. The
ten are lifted at once, as easily as a child
would lift a pin; they are carried to a flat
car, lowered on to the car, the current is
turned off, releasing the rails, and the
magnet travels back to get another load.
To realize what progress the human
race has made, remember that the race
lived for more than two thousand cen
turies not knowing how to use iron, and
then see that giant magnet at Gary loading
a car with steel rails, brought from an ore
bed one thousand miles away, changed
from the ore into the finished rail, AND
NEVER TOUCHED BY A MAN’S HAND
EXCEPT AS THE MAN WITH THE
CLEAR EYE TURNED THE RAIL AND
ORDERED THE MACHINE TO
STRAIGHTEN IT.
* * *
There is SLAVERY, and the ideal slav
ery that will free the whole human race,
by making Nature’s power MAN’S
SLAVE.
When you see the picture on this page,
when you know what man has done since
the days when slaves toiled to build the
pyramids under heavy loads and under
the lash, you cannot doubt that man’s con
quest and freedom will be absolute.
You cannot doubt that man on this
earth will be the absolute ruler of his
planet, shaping it, remoulding it as he will,
free and powerful—and the poverty and
the horror of to-day will have become a
memory as dim and as distant as the stone
age is to us.
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