y, there was not strength in American
sinews, nor endurance in her lungs, nor vigor in the product of her
loins. Her people were herded together in great cities, where they
slept in gigantic apartment houses, like mud swallows in a sand
bank. They overate of artificial food that was made in great
factories. They over-dressed with tight-fitting unsanitary clothing
made by the sweated labor of the diseased and destitute. They
over-drank of old liquors born of ancient ignorance and of new
concoctions born of prostituted science. They smoked and perfumed
and doped with chemicals and cosmetics--the supposed virtues of
which were blazoned forth on earth and sky day and night.

The wealth of the United States was enormous, yet it was chiefly in
the hands of the few. The laborers went forth from their rookeries
by subway and monorail, and served their shifts in the mills of
industry.

In turn, others took their places, and the mills ground night and
day.

Even the farm lands had been largely taken over by corporate
control. Crops on the plains were planted with power machinery. The
rough lands had all been converted into forests or game preserves
for the rich. Agriculture had been developed as a science, but not
as a husbandry. The forcing system had been generally applied to
plants and animals. Wonder-working nitrogenous fertilizers made at
Niagara and by the wave motors of the coast made all vegetation to
grow with artificial luxury. Corn-fed hogs and the rotund carcasses
of stall-fed cattle were produced on mammoth ranches for the
edification of mankind, and fowl were hatched by the billions in
huge incubators, and the chicks reared and slaughtered with scarcely
a touch of a human hand. And all this was under the control of
concentrated business organization. The old, sturdy, wasteful farmer
class had gone out of existence.

Only the rich who owned aeroplanes could afford to live in the
country. The poor had been forced to the cities where they could be
sheltered _en masse_, and fed, as it were, by machinery. New York
had a population of twenty-three millions. Manhattan Island had been
extended by filling in the shallows of the bay, until the Battery
reached almost to Staten Island. The aeroplane stations that topped
her skyscrapers stood, many of them, a quarter of a mile from the
ground.

As the materially greatest nation in the world, the United States
had an enormous national patriotism based on vanity. The large