It was the Mouth of the City, and drawn from all directions, over a
territory of immense area, this glut of crude subsistence was sucked
in, as if into a rapacious gullet, to feed the sinews and to nourish
the fibres of an immeasurable colossus.

Suddenly the meaning and significance of it all dawned upon Laura.
The Great Grey City, brooking no rival, imposed its dominion upon a
reach of country larger than many a kingdom of the Old World. For,
thousands of miles beyond its confines was its influence felt. Out,
far out, far away in the snow and shadow of Northern Wisconsin
forests, axes and saws bit the bark of century-old trees, stimulated
by this city's energy. Just as far to the southward pick and drill
leaped to the assault of veins of anthracite, moved by her central
power. Her force turned the wheels of harvester and seeder a
thousand miles distant in Iowa and Kansas. Her force spun the screws
and propellers of innumerable squadrons of lake steamers crowding
the Sault Sainte Marie. For her and because of her all the Central
States, all the Great Northwest roared with traffic and industry;
sawmills screamed; factories, their smoke blackening the sky,
clashed and flamed; wheels turned, pistons leaped in their
cylinders; cog gripped cog; beltings clasped the drums of mammoth
wheels; and converters of forges belched into the clouded air their
tempest breath of molten steel.

It was Empire, the resistless subjugation of all this central world
of the lakes and the prairies. Here, mid-most in the land, beat the
Heart of the Nation, whence inevitably must come its immeasurable
power, its infinite, infinite, inexhaustible vitality. Here, of all
her cities, throbbed the true life--the true power and spirit of
America; gigantic, crude with the crudity of youth, disdaining