They got it. From all the states the people came; thinly at first,
and slowly, but faster and faster in thicker and thicker swarms as the
quick years went by. White people came, and black people and brown
people and yellow people; the negroes came from the South by the
thousands and thousands, multiplying by other thousands and thousands
faster than they could die. From the four quarters of the earth the
people came, the broken and the unbroken, the tame and the wild--
Germans, Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Scotch, Welsh, English, French,
Swiss, Swedes, Norwegians, Greeks, Poles, Russian Jews, Dalmatians,
Armenians, Rumanians, Servians, Persians, Syrians, Japanese, Chinese,
Turks, and every hybrid that these could propagate. And if there
were no Eskimos nor Patagonians, what other human strain that earth
might furnish failed to swim and bubble in this crucible?

With Bigness came the new machinery and the rush; the streets began
to roar and rattle, the houses to tremble; the pavements were worn
under the tread of hurrying multitudes. The old, leisurely, quizzical
look of the faces was lost in something harder and warier; and a
cockney type began to emerge discernibly--a cynical young mongrel
barbaric of feature, muscular and cunning; dressed in good fabrics
fashioned apparently in imitation of the sketches drawn by newspaper
comedians. The female of his kind came with him--a pale girl, shoddy
and a little rouged; and they communicated in a nasal argot, mainly
insolences and elisions. Nay, the common speech of the people showed
change: in place of the old midland vernacular, irregular but clean,
and not unwholesomely drawling, a jerky dialect of coined metaphors
began to be heard, held together by GUNNAS and GOTTAS and much
fostered by the public journals.