Part I

2

3

4 The speed of the ‘‘Twentieth Century Limited’’ roaring by an observer at its trackside may be reduced to a snail-like crawl not by the observer’s throwing a stop signal ahead, which causes the engineer to throttle down, but simply through the seemingly irrelevant act on the part of our observer of zooming aloft in a pursuit plane.

5 From this aeronautic viewpoint as the horizon increases, the relative speed of the train through the observer’s world is diminished.

6 Thus do aviators regain daylight after the sun has set.

7 So in super perspective to us do the stars,

8 moving at thousands of times the speed of the ‘‘Twentieth Century’’ seemingly hang motionless in the night sky.

9 From, let us say, a fifty-thousand foot sky vantage, do events in the making, unpredictable

10 from man’s usual earth level viewpoint, become readily predictable—the flood lands ahead

11 which the train approaches.

12 But even as we after sunset regain the sun by flying aloft, so may we regain observation of events seemingly

13 long past to the man in the street;—at least, gain accurate record

14 of the outstanding causes and effects of those events—

15 of a many-mile wake in the water soon to resolve.

16 Thus may we well comprehend that since the important causes and effects never were visible in historical scale to the man at earth level, his recording of history was of necessity naive,—legendary,—and full of fanciful misemphasis on back-eddy flotsam edging the main streams.

17 But our sky-vantage reviewing is summarily accompanied by a sense not only of slow motion of the events enacted, but also of relative belittlement in trend significance of any precise time of impact, or any direct agency act,—in the consecutive push-over flows,—to the greater import of the over-all happenings themselves; and to the clearly tracked passages of past and hither ward trends of over-lapping causes and results which interplay to the horizon.

18 And it is from this fifty-thousand foot elevation on a particularly clear ‘‘North West’’ day that we review the portentous entry of INDUSTRIALIZATION into the U.S.A, cosmos outwardly around whose whole horizon lies the rest of the world.