Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/22

16 as television, steep-flight airplanes and those relating to artificial climate making, about which new industries may arise with the possibility of bringing a new era of prosperity. However, the most important results are quite likely to issue from discoveries which cannot now be foreseen.

Anything in the nature of successful long distance planning is, of course, fraught with great difficulty since new discoveries and their many consequences cannot be foretold, J. P. Morgan and Co. refused to buy for $5,000,000 a block of stock in General Motors Corporation, which subsequently became worth $200,000,000; and only ten years before the world war Simon Newcomb declared that the problem of mechanical flight by man was impossible of solution. Anticipated social and economic effects of the mechanical cotton picker for which planning has been urged may be entirely voided by the successful production of a satisfactory substitute directly from the cellulose of trees without the intervention of the mule or the tractor and the plow. In the field of artificial climate making, the surface of possibilities has hardly been scratched even though air-conditioning installation had risen from 14 million dollars in 1934 to over 50 million dollars in 1936, with prospects of a large expansion in this business in the future. The development of tray, or soil-less, farming may entirely change the picture of agriculture and its perennially troublesome problems. It is not difficult to forsee in artificial climate making a force which may raise the health level and change production methods in may industries and affect the distribution of population in such a way that even the tropics may be made habitable for a dense white population and offer a temporary relief from the oncoming saturation of population in temperate regions. Many old industries are bound to be greatly modified or entirely superseded; but on the whole the prospect for the next 25 years is that so many more things will be produced at so much less cost that we shall be swamped with abundant life and a multitude of new jobs.

As long as men have unsatisfied desires there will continue the urge for innovation and improvement. America is the happiest, wealthiest, most progressive country on earth because its people are richest in desires and expectations with the greatest freedom to satisfy them. The people of the United States have 7% of the world's population but over 70% of its automobiles—more people owning cars than had enough to eat 150 years ago; they wear 75% of the worlds silk; have 58% of the telephones; use 25% of the sugar, 50% of the coffee, and so on.

They are not agreed as to details of what they wish next, though in general looking toward a Utopia of recreation, mechanical conveniences and workless bliss. All are agreed in being dissatisfied with things as they are, so much so that a recent French writer has defined an American as "a man who wants something." This a newspaper writer amends to say "An American is a man who wants something from his Government besides government." It has been suggested that to the average Frenchman an American