One Man in His Time by Ellen Glasgow — Read

The spirit of the age, the worship of the many-headed god of magnitude, was holding carnival in the town. Faster and faster buildings were rising; the higher and more flimsily built, the better it seemed, for it is easier to demolish walls that have been lightly erected. Everywhere people were pushing one another into the slums or the country. Everywhere the past was going out with the times and the future was coming on in a torrent. Two opposing principles, the conservative and the progressive, had struggled for victory, and the progressive principle had won. To add more and more numbers; to build higher and higher; to push harder and harder; and particularly to improve what had been already added or built or pushed -- these impulses had united at last into a frenzied activity. And while the building and the pushing and the improving went on, the village grew into the town, the town grew into the city, and the city grew out into the country.

Beneath it all, informing the apparent confusion, there was some crude belief that the symbol of material success is size, and that size in itself, regardless of quality or condition, is civilization. For the many-headed god is a god of sacrifice. He makes a wilderness of beauty and calls it progress.