Читать книгу The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence онлайн

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It was really a fascinating problem in proportion. The men of fifty years ago stood thus and so to a known crisis; similar men of the present stand thus to an unknown crisis—and now find the crisis. When I had finished “Manassas” I took up the writing of “The Jungle”; which is simply to say that I was drawn on irresistibly to seek for this latter crisis, and to try to understand it—to get into the heart of it, and live it and follow it to its end, just as I had done with the earlier one. So now I feel that I have much the same sort of power as Cuvier, the naturalist, who could construct a prehistoric animal from a bit of its bone. I have far more than the bone of this monster—I have his tail, beginning far back in the seventies; and I have the whole of his huge body—the present. I have counted his scales and measured his limbs; I have even felt his pulse and had his blood under the microscope. And now you ask me—How many more vertebræ will there be in the neck of this strange animal? And what will be the size and the shape of his head?