Though this gentleman received us with the utmost courtesy, he declared that the company desired no publicity, and plainly indicated that he was not disposed to let us into the plant.

“I’ll tell you what the trouble is,” said my companion to me.  “This company is a part of the United States Steel Corporation, and in the old muckraking days it was thoroughly raked.  They think that we have come down here full of passionate feeling over the poor, downtrodden workingman and the great, greedy octopus.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, we are a writer and an artist.  Lots of writers and artists have made good livings by teaching magazine readers that it is dishonest for a corporation, or a corporation official, to prosper; that the way to integrity is through insolvency; that the word ‘company’ is a term of reproach, while ‘corporation’ is a foul epithet, and ‘trust’ blasphemy.”

“What shall we do?”

“We must make it clear to these people,” he said, “that we have no mission.  We must satisfy them that we are not reformers—­that we didn’t come to dig out a red-hot story, but to see red-hot rails rolled out.”

Pursuing this course, we were successful.  All that any official of the company required of us was that we be open-minded.  The position of the company, when we came to understand it, was simply that it did not wish to facilitate the work of men who came down with pencils, paper, and preconceived “views,” deliberately to play the great American game of “swat the corporation.”

* * * * *

Surely there is not in the world an industry which, for sheer pictorial magnificence, rivals the modern manufacturing of steel.  In the first place, the scale of everything is inexpressibly stupendous.  To speak of a row of six blast furnaces, with mouths a hundred feet above the ground, and chimneys rising perhaps another hundred feet above these mouths, is not, perhaps, impressive, but to look at such a row of furnaces, to see their fodder of ore, dolomite, and coke brought in by train loads; to see it fed to them by the “skip”; to hear them roar continually for more; to feel the savage heat generated within their bodies; to be told in shouts, above the din, something of what is going on inside these vast, voracious, savage monsters, and to see them dripping their white-hot blood when they are picked by a long steel bar in the hands of an atom of a man—­this is to witness an almost terrifying allegory of mankind’s achievement.

The gas generated by blast furnaces is used in part in the hot-blast stoves—­gigantic tanks from which hot air, at very high pressure, is admitted to the furnaces themselves, and is also used to develop steam for the blowing engines and other auxiliaries.  In the furnaces the molten iron, because of its greater specific gravity, settles to the bottom, while the slag floats to the top.  The slag, by the way, is not, as I had supposed, altogether worthless, but is used for railroad ballast and in the manufacture of cement.