But here toil
and stress went on as usual, and Piers Otway saw it all in a lurid
light. These towering edifices with inscriptions numberless,
announcing every imaginable form of trade with every corner of the
world; here a vast building, consecrate in all its commercial
magnificence, great windows and haughty doorways, the gleam of
gilding and of brass, the lustre of polished woods, to a single
company or firm; here a huge structure which housed on its many
floors a crowd of enterprises, names by the score signalled at the
foot of the gaping staircase; arrogant suggestions of triumph side
by side with desperate beginnings; titles of world-wide significance
meeting the eye at every turn, vulgar names with more weight than
those of princes, words in small lettering which ruled the fate of
millions of men;--no nightmare was ever so crushing to one in
Otway's mood. The brute force of money; the negation of the
individual--these, the evils of our time, found there supreme
expression in the City of London. Here was opulence at home and
superb; here must poverty lurk and shrink, feeling itself alive only
on sufferance; the din of highway and byway was a voice of
blustering conquest, bidding the weaker to stand aside or be
crushed. Here no man was a human being, but each merely a portion of
an inconceivably complicated mechanism. The shiny-hatted figure who
rushed or sauntered, gloomed by himself at corners or made one of a
talking group, might elsewhere be found a reasonable and kindly
person, with traits, peculiarities; here one could see in him
nothing but a money-maker of this or that class, ground to a certain
pattern.
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