-5- formerly; and they show no disposition to get out of the way of their younger fellows. The best authorities on social statistics say that in 1970 the populations of all industrial countries will begin to decline, if present influences continue; and there will be increasing numbers of unemployed and of decrepit folk who pay doctors good fees to keep them alive. Finally, under modern individual and corporate freedom, have built vast canal systems at a cost of billions of the popular savings. These canals were promptly paralled by railroads which took away their traffic- witness the Erie and the Pennsylvania canal systems. Then the railroads were in large measure antiquated by motor cars, buses and trucks; and now the flying machine receives vast governmental grants for taking the nails away from the railroads which also receive heavy subventions not to let the flyers have their pouches. Moreover, the railroads focussed their traffic in a few great centres; they did this contrary to popular opinion. This increased the value of urban land a hundredfold. The effects of these and other influences centered all great industry and world finance in the same favored cities; and railway, bank and other dir- ectors of the industrial age, masters of world centres, assumed airs of ancient monarchs and raised sky scrapers almost beyond normal vision, which a visit to New York will amply reveal. The result was the sale of something like a hundred billions of railway, industrial and skyscraper stock to a misguided public- securities which had no substantial basis of real property. The earning power of the masses was wholly |