It was wheat,fit for the grindstones as it lay.They manoeuvred the fore-hatch of that steamer directly under an elevator--a house of red tin a hundred and fifty feet high.Then they let down into that fore-hatch a trunk as if it had been the trunk of an elephant,but stiff,because it was a pipe of iron-champed wood.And the trunk had a steel-shod nose to it,and contained an endless chain of steel buckets.
Then the captain swore,raising his eyes to heaven,and a gruff voice answered him from the place he swore at,and certain machinery,also in the firmament,began to clack,and the glittering,steel-shod nose of that trunk burrowed into the wheat,and the wheat quivered and sunk upon the instant as water sinks when the siphon sucks,because the steel buckets within the trunk were flying upon their endless round,carrying away each its appointed morsel of wheat.
The elevator was a Persian well wheel--a wheel squashed out thin and cased in a pipe,a wheel driven not by bullocks,but by much horse-power,licking up the grain at the rate of thou-sands of bushels the hour.And the wheat sunk into the fore-hatch while a man looked--sunk till the brown timbers of the bulkheads showed bare,and men leaped down through clouds of golden dust and shovelled the wheat furiously round the nose of the trunk,and got a steam-shovel of glittering steel and made that shovel also,till there remained of the grain not more than a horse leaves in the fold of his nose-bag.
In this manner do they handle wheat at Buffalo.On one side of the elevator is the steamer,on the other the railway track;and the wheat is loaded into the cars in bulk.Wah!wah!God is great,and I do not think He ever intended Gar Sahai or Luckman Narain to supply England with her wheat.India can cut in not without profit to herself when her harvest is good and the Ameri-can yield poor;but this very big country can,upon the average,supply the earth with all the beef and bread that is required.
A man in the train said to me:--"We kin feed all the earth,jest as easily as we kin whip all the earth."Now the second statement is as false as the first is true.One of these days the respectable Republic will find this out.
Unfortunately we,the English,will never be the people to teach her;because she is a chartered libertine allowed to say and do anything she likes,from demanding the head of the empress in an editorial waste-basket,to chevying Canadian schooners up and down the Alaska Seas.It is perfectly impossible to go to war with these people,whatever they may do.
They are much too nice,in the first place,and in the second,it would throw out all the passenger traffic of the Atlantic,and upset the financial arrangements of the English syndicates who have invested their money in breweries,railways,and the like,and in the third,it's not to be done.Everybody knows that,and no one better than the American.
Yet there are other powers who are not "ohai band"(of the brotherhood)--China,for instance.Try to believe an irresponsible writer when he assures you that China's fleet to-day,if properly manned,could waft the entire American navy out of the water and into the blue.The big,fat Republic that is afraid of nothing,because nothing up to the present date has happened to make her afraid,is as unprotected as a jelly-fish.
Not internally,of course--it would be madness for any Power to throw men into America;they would die--but as far as regards coast defence.
From five miles out at sea (I have seen a test of her "fortified"ports)a ship of the power of H.M.S."Collingwood"(they haven't run her on a rock yet)would wipe out any or every town from San Francisco to Long Branch;and three first-class ironclads would account for New York,Bartholdi's Statue and all.
Reflect on this.'Twould be "Pay up or go up"round the entire coast of the United States.To this furiously answers the patriotic American:--"We should not pay.We should invent a Columbiad in Pittsburg or--or anywhere else,and blow any outsider into h--l."They might invent.They might lay waste their cities and retire inland,for they can subsist entirely on their own produce.
Meantime,in a war waged the only way it could be waged by an unscrupulous Power,their coast cities and their dock-yards would be ashes.They could construct their navy inland if they liked,but you could never bring a ship down to the water-ways,as they stand now.
They could not,with an ordinary water patrol,despatch one regiment of men six miles across the seas.There would be about five million excessively angry,armed men pent up within American limits.These men would require ships to get themselves afloat.
The country has no such ships,and until the ships were built New York need not be allowed a single-wheeled carriage within her limits.
Behold now the glorious condition of this Republic which has no fear.There is ransom and loot past the counting of man on her seaboard alone--plunder that would enrich a nation--and she has neither a navy nor half a dozen first-class ports to guard the whole.No man catches a snake by the tail,because the creature will sting;but you can build a fire around a snake that will make it squirm.
The country is supposed to be building a navy now.When the ships are completed her alliance will be worth having--if the alliance of any republic can be relied upon.For the next three years she can be hurt,and badly hurt.Pity it is that she is of our own blood,looking at the matter from a Pindarr is point of view.Dog cannot eat dog.
