In the other palace it appeared that the great American scrapping process was even yet far from complete.  At first sight this other seemed to resemble the former one, but I was soon instructed that the former one was as naught to this one, for here the turbine—­the “strong, silent man” among engines—­was replacing the racket of cylinder and crank.  Statistics are tiresome and futile to stir the imagination.  I disdain statistics, even when I assimilate them.  And yet when my attention was directed to one trifling block of metal, and I was told that it was the most powerful “unit” in the world, and that it alone would make electricity sufficient for the lighting of a city of a quarter of a million people, I felt that statistics, after all, could knock you a staggering blow....  In this other palace, too, was the same solitude of machinery, attending most conscientiously and effectively to itself.  A singularly disconcerting spectacle!  And I reflected that, according to dreams already coming true, the telephone-exchange also would soon be a solitude of clicking contact-points, functioning in mystic certitude, instead of a convent of girls requiring sugar and couches, and thirsting for love.  A singularly disconcerting prospect!

But was it necessary to come to America in order to see and describe telephone-exchanges and electrical power-houses?  Do not these wonders exist in all the cities of earth?  They do, but not to quite the same degree of wondrousness.  Hat-shops, and fine hat-shops, exist in New York, but not to quite the same degree of wondrousness as in Paris.  People sing in New York, but not with quite the same natural lyricism as in Naples.  The great civilizations all present the same features; but it is just the differences in degree between the same feature in this civilization and in that—­it is just these differences which together constitute and illustrate the idiosyncrasy of each.  It seems to me that the brains and the imagination of America shone superlatively in the conception and ordering of its vast organizations of human beings, and of machinery, and of the two combined.  By them I was more profoundly attracted, impressed, and inspired than by any other non-spiritual phenomena whatever in the United States.  For me they were the proudest material achievements, and essentially the most poetical achievements, of the United States.  And that is why I am dwelling on them.

* * * * *

Further, there are business organizations in America of a species which do not flourish at all in Europe.  For example, the “mail-order house,” whose secrets were very generously displayed to me in Chicago—­a peculiar establishment which sells merely everything (except patent-medicines)—­on condition that you order it by post.  Go into that house with money in your palm, and ask for a fan or a flail or a fur-coat or a fountain-pen or a fiddle, and you will be requested to return home and write a letter