You have only to go to Detroit to see this pulsating drama of production in action.  Here beats the heart of the motor world; here a mighty army is evolving a vast industrial epic.

Its banners are the smoke that trails from a hundred soaring stacks; its music is the clang of a thousand forges and the rattle of a maze of machinery.

You feel this quickening life the moment you enter the city, for the tang of its uplift is in the air.  There is an automobile for every fifty people in Detroit.  The children on the streets know the name, make, and model of nearly all the cars produced.  You can stand in front of the Hotel Pontchartrain, in the public square, and see the whole automobile world chug by.

Formerly our cities were motor-mad; now, as in the case of Detroit, they are motor-made.  Ten years ago the proudest boast of the Michigan metropolis was that she produced more pills, paint, stoves, and freight-cars than any other American city.  The volume of the largest of these industries did not exceed eighteen million dollars a year.  To-day she leads the world in automobile production.  Her twenty-five factories turn out, in a year, more than ninety thousand cars, or more than sixty per cent, of the total output of the United States.  These cars alone would stretch from New York to Boston.

But these figures do not convey any adequate idea of what the motor-car has done for Detroit.  You must go to the spot to feel the galvanic and compelling force that the industry projects.  The city is like a mining-camp in the days of a fabulous strike.  Instead of new mines, there are new factories every day, and the record of this industrial high tide is being made in brick, stone, and mortar.  Energy, resource, and ingenuity are being pushed to the last limit to take advantage of the golden opportunity that the overwhelming demand for the automobile has created.  It is a thrilling and distinctively American spectacle, and it makes one feel proud and glad to be part of the people who are achieving it.

Some of the new plants have risen almost overnight, and on every hand there are miracles of rapid construction.  The business is overshadowing all other activities.  A leading merchant of Detroit asked a contractor the other day if he could do some work for him.  On receiving a negative reply, he asked the reason, whereupon the man said:  “These automobile people keep me so busy that I can’t do anything else.  I have a year’s work ahead now.”

A visit to any one of the great automobile factories reveals an inspiring picture of cheerful labor.  As you wind through the wildernesses of lathes, hearing a swirling industry singing its iron song of swelling progress, you find enthusiasm blending with organized ability in a marvelous attack on work.  Plants with a daily capacity of forty cars turn out sixty.  You can behold a complete machine produced every three minutes; you can see the evolution from steel billet to finished car in six days.  Formerly it took five months.