TEN years ago, the low dunes, a desert of yellow sand and beach-grass, stretched unbroken from the foot of Lake Michigan south to the headwaters of the Kankakee. Since the early days when the good Father Marquette was paddled slowly around the curving beach line to die finally on the Michigan shore, they have remained a desert of soft colors in the summer, a sleet-swept tract in winter. A few miles north, on the western edge of the lake, a vast city, in a single century, was born and thrust its towers high against the horizon. Then, suddenly, came an instant transformation. Other cities, filled with the men of every nation, flattened the dunes into level streets. Along the lake shore strange structures of steel, reeking with smoke and blackness, streaked the sky with a cloud by day and a glare of furnaces by night. From a hundred meshing tracks the clamor of locomotives rose above the murmur of the city's streets. Steel, Vulcan, had usurped the wastes of sand and wiry beach-grass. Progress and industry stained the blue Indiana sky with the smoke of a thousand chimneys.

The long concrete slip slashed the beach lines. Beyond its mouth the lake, a brilliant ultramarine, pounded in before the north wind; but inside, the quiet water was tawny with riled sand and the stain of iron. Against the nearest dock an ore steamer rested its long, low body beneath the shadow of a steel trestle that reached out, far above it. With sudden motion a grab-bucket swung down on slender cables from the trestle

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and disappeared in the waist of the ship. In an instant it lifted on tightened cables, heavy with ore, and swung ashore with grinding vibration of wheels and electric motors. to drop its contents on the ore pile that ran parallel with the dock. Like a mountain range the vermilion peaks of ore piled up above me, from the mouth of the harbor far inland, so high that behind them only the tops of the tallest furnaces appeared against the sky. From the scarred hills of northern Minnesota, down the length of Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, other steamers were bringing fresh food for the hungry furnaces. The reverberation of the mills rose sharp above the even cadence of the surf.

Like strange Martian creatures the blast furnaces squatted beyond the ore piles. Ample-waisted, they flanked it, and between their huge structures the long row of 'stoves,' high as modest skyscrapers, lifted their slender domes in even line. Beyond, a vast pile of coal reared black against white heaps of broken limestone.

Inside the steel structure which inclosed the furnace a score of blackened, half-naked men were moulding huge troughs of sand to receive the surplus iron which would pour forth when later they 'cast the furnace.' Hot, and enormous in girth, the furnace filled the building. Inside, under forced draught, and at a temperature of 3500 degrees, layers of coke, limestone, and iron ore were undergoing their vital transformation. By the heat of the consuming coke the iron was filtering down in

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liquid flood, purified and refined by the flux of melted limestone.

From beneath the furnace a squat locomotive dragged a string of curious cars across a desolate field to the steel mills. On low trucks the ladles, like inverted cones, carried the liquid metal, - so hot that four hours might elapse before it solidified.

In the twilight of a long corrugated building the brick ovens of the open hearths stretched away into almost indefinable distance. Heat, fresh consuming heat, choked the air. And from chinks in the hearths a white light of indescribable intensity pierced my eyeballs.

The trainload of molten metal had arrived before us. Already a big-lipped ladle had been dragged by an electric engine into the gloom of the building, and up to the hearth-mouth.

The doors of the hearth were thrown suddenly open. A blinding whiteness streaked with saffron, and heat almost beyond endurance, made me draw back behind a column. A workman thrust a pair of deep-blue glasses in my hand. Slowly the great ladle bent forward. From its spout a trickle of fluid iron poured faster and faster until the white cascade, at full flood, seethed into the hearth-bath. A shower of sparks, strange flowery pyrotechnics, shot high into the gloom. Through the blue glass I peered into the hearth. Like an infernal lake it swirled and eddied, a whirlpool of incandescent flame. Leaping tongues of pink and lavender danced in the blue darkness. Shielding their goggled faces from the heat, the workmen cast lumps of rich ore into the hearth-mouth,black silhouettes of men against the blue glare of an uncanny firelight.

Behind the long row of open hearths huge cranes rumbled back and forth on their tracks beneath the roof, the operators, concealed somewhere on their rivet-studded frames, directing the

swinging cables that lifted and carried weights inconceivable. High in the dark vault a great crane swung over us.

"They're going to tap a heat,' shouted the assistant superintendent in my ear, his words sounding faint and fragmentary above the steady roar that filled the building.

On the floor below, an electric motor trundled an empty ladle into place beneath the rear of one of the hearths.

Then from the hearth, with a mad daze of brilliancy, fifty-six tons of molten steel began to disgorge itself. Once more I put on the blue glasses. Against the deep purple gloom of the building the stream of metal shot forward and bent in the soft curve of running water. Like pale moonbeams the sunlight rays from glassless windows pierced thedarkness, and sharp across them leaped the avalanche of steel, a flood of brilliant pink and blue that showered the room with a constellation of falling stars.

For a brief minute I took off the glasses. In the terrible glare of light all background disappeared. Gone were the dark shapes of the toilers beneath; gone the uncanny moonlight. Yellow, tawny, brilliant as the contact of an electric arc, the swirling metal scorched my vision. A halo of flame seemed to envelop the ladle.

It was full. Through the glass, again, it boiled soapy and seething, the crest of its wave-tossed surface crimson and blue. Slowly from the crane above, two great hooks, like bent fingers, caught the handles on its sides, lifted it, and with a hail of sparks and a glare of heat against our faces, swung it far above us. Then, with grinding reverberation, it moved past, far down the long gallery, to be poured into ingots in the waiting moulds.

In the 'blooming mill' there was the continuous rumble of mighty thunder. Cherry red against the darkness, the incandescent ingots of steel shot back

and forth between giant fingers that pressed and worked them at every passing; for like dough that must be kneaded to acquire a certain consistency, steel must be worked to obtain those qualities which its ultimate purpose will demand.

Into a great plank a hundred feet long the solid ingot flattened resistlessly between the stroking rollers. Then, finished, it shot abruptly beneath a knife that snipped it lightly into even bars of manageable weight.

In the structural mill the billets of steel, still malleable with glowing heat, rumbled noisily back and forth on the metal floor, propelled invisibly by countless whirling rollers that shot them with incredible speed and certainty of direction. As I looked down the length of the gloomy building, the glare of the moving bars of metal contrasted so sharply with the black floor that they alone were visible, like strange illuminated bodies that floated and swam on a sea of inky water. Through devious channels they navigated, palpably changing, narrowing, lengthening, until at last, in the far end of the building, the finished angle-bar or I-beam was deposited, a perfect thing, of cooling lead-gray steel.

And still more buildings; parallel with each other; equally vast; filled with darkness and tumult, the shifting shapes of giant roof-hung cranes, and the red glow of heated metal. Like paste from a tube, a thin rope of whitehot steel emerged from a shapeless ma

chine that crouched squat on the iron floor, and with a breath of heat disappeared in the breast of another monster that trembled with the reverberation of a hundred hammers. And faster than the hand of my watch could count the seconds, a hail of railroad spikes, still glowing, leaped finished from its thundering womb. Bolts, spikes, nuts, and rivets, madly, with the tumult of clashing steel, poured finished from the vitals of the uncouth machines.

Plates of steel for the flanks of ships which will some day transport the wares of a trading world. Rails and spikes to carry high over mountain passes the flitting trains that make distant cities one. Bolt, rivet, and girder for the towering building. Steel, steel for its multifold destinies, here it is born in heat and labor. Steel for an age of steel.

In the twilight of the late summer afternoon the world seemed strangely quiet and at peace. Sharp and black against the yellow sky the roofs and stacks of the mills rose like the sky-line of a ruined city; and in an occasional opening the blue lake gleamed with the brilliant light of sapphire. In the gathering darkness electric lights began to glimmer. Flares of dull-red gas-flame burst out like volcanoes and suddenly were gone.

Loud and metallic a hurdy-gurdy lifted the rippling cadence of a Neapolitan air in a distant street. Beyond the mill-yard gates the saloon windows shone gayly and arc lights trembled into life. Day was over.

I

In a previous essay, published in the Atlantic Monthly for December last, I showed at length how this war, like all European wars, was caused by the working of a false theory of the state on the minds and passions of rulers, statesmen, journalists, and other leaders of opinion. In the pages that follow it is my object to discuss in some detail the kind of settlement which will be needed at the peace, if such wars are not to recur again and again. But since men's ideas as to the kind of peace that is desirable are affected by their conception of the causes of the war, I must begin by protesting against the view, industriously disseminated by the English, and, no doubt, by the French and Russian press, that the only cause of the war was the wickedness of Germany. For this view clearly is much too simple and superficial; and it leads to a wrong conception of the remedy. Let us then briefly examine it.

'Germany,' we say, 'made the war.' Germany? But what is Germany? The German people? The peasants? The factory laborers? The millions of Social Democrats? They made the war? Is it likely? Ten days before the war broke out they, like the people everywhere, were working, resting, eating, sleeping, dreaming of nothing less than of war. War came upon them like a thunderclap. The German people are

as peaceable as every other. Their soldiers complain of it. We are fond of quoting General Bernhardi, but we never quote the passage in which he explains why he wrote his book. He wrote it, he tells us, to counteract 'the aspirations for peace which seem to dominate our age and threaten to poison the soul of the German people.' Now that the war has come, the German people are fighting; but they are fighting, as they believe, to protect their hearths and homes against the wanton aggression of Russia, France, and, above all, England. Like all the other peoples, they are fighting what they believe to be a defensive war. That is the tragic irony of it. Whoever made the war, it was not any of the peoples.

"Then, it was the German government.' Yes, or else it was the Russian, or else it was both. In any case, it was a very few men. The peace of Europe was in the hands of some score of individuals. They could make war, and the hundreds of millions who were to fight and to suffer could not stop it. That is the really extraordinary fact. That is what is worth dwelling on. How could it happen? Why are the nations passive clay in the hands of their governments?

First, because they do not know one another. They speak different languages, live different kinds of lives, have different manners and customs.