Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/238

 a new sense of public decency, the result of a profound impulse in the public consciousness, and I had been of those who in my town had opposed the political machines. Constructive thinking and constructive work being the hardest task in the world, one of which our democracy in its present development is not yet fully capable, the impulse spent itself largely in destructive work. That was natural; it is a quality inherent in humanity. My friend Kermode F. Gill, the artist-builder and contractor of Cleveland, once told me that while it is difficult to get men to carry on any large construction, and carry it on well, and necessary to set task masters over them to have the work done at all, there is a wholly different spirit in evidence when the work is one of demolition. If a great building is to be torn down, the men need no task masters, no speeding up, they fly at it in a perfect frenzy, with a veritable passion, and tear it down so swiftly that the one difficulty is to get the salvage. And in the course of building public works I have observed the same phenomenon. While the forces are tearing down, while they are excavating, that black fringe of spectators, the "crow line" the builders call it, is always there. But when once the work is above ground, and construction begins, when the structure lifts itself, when it aspires,—the crow line dissolves and melts quite away. This, in a sense, is true of man in any of his operations. When the great awakening came, after the first shock of surprise, after the first resolve to do better, the public went at the work of demolition, all about the arena