TRANSPORTATION THE LADDER OF CIVILIZATION

Transportation, some one has well said, has been the ladder upon which humanity climbed from a condition of primitive life to that of a finely wrought and complex civilization.

As the number of automobiles has grown, the wealth of the country has in-creased. In 1909 we had less than three hundred thousand motor vehicles in commission and the national income amounted to less than twenty-nine billion dollars. To-day, with our thirteen million registered vehicles, the national income is around sixty billion dollars.

Although we are, as a nation, according to Moody, the statistician, spending more for our automobile service than is being spent for railroad transportation, shelter, or heat and light�more, indeed, than for any other item in our national budget except clothing and meats�our savings-bank deposits and every other index of economic well-being tell the same story of the growth of our national wealth.

Economic readjustments are taking place on a major scale, and with increasing momentum, under the irresistible impact of automotive mileage.

Cities are spreading out. Long Island is built up for half its length to accommodate those who make New York the metropolis of America ; so is New Jersey from Morristown to Long Branch and from Jersey City to the Empire State boundary at Suffern. Even Connecticut, as far as Stamford, Greenwich, and New Canaan, is peopled with those who work in Gotham by day and sleep in the country by night.

Chicago has the same story to tell, with its scores of consequential colonies, its dozens of outlying subdivisions. Philadelphia and San Francisco are but other examples of how men are coming to work in town and live in the country.

Not only in a residential way are cities undergoing a change, but also in a business way. The trek of branch banks far out beyond the business district is but one straw showing the direction of the transportation wind. The lack of parking space down town is making an ever-widening business district and new centers of commercial activity in every major urban community. The era of down-town crowding is forcing the future to change radically our orthodox type of commercial concentration.

BUYING PEACHES ON A NEW YORK STATE HIGHWAY

Motorists in New York and New England find everything, from apples and peaches to eggs and jellies, offered for sale by the roadside; and the prices are usually surprisingly low.

CLEARING NEW GROUND WITH A TRACTOR

Five acres per day can be cleared with a thirty-horsepower tractor and a twenty-four-inch plow. The reader born on a farm will doubtless remember the time when the brush this machine plows under had to be grubbed out, piled and burned, and the ground "ripped" up with a "bull-tongue" shovel plow.

A "COMBINE" AT WORK ON A CANADIAN FARM

This machine cuts, threshes, and delivers to the wagon alongside more than foo acres of wheat a day. Many elderly people can remember the grain-cradle and hand-flail era, when it would have required the labor of some three hundred men to do the same work in the same length of time, to say nothing of the twenty-eight horses required to haul in the crop. Even the hinder and the threshing-machine would call for about sixty men and forty horses for cutting, hauling in, and threshing a hundred acres of wheat in a day.

BONANZA FARMING IN CANADA

This picture of operations in a seven-thousand-acre Canadian wheat-field shows the character of the competition the American farmer must meet in the future. One tractor and six men do the work of twenty-eight horses and fourteen men, with horse-drawn binders. The high cost of labor will do more than any other agency to bring about lower production costs on the farm by necessitating an increased substitution of machines for hands.

High schools are spreading out through the rural districts, and the general substitution of systematic secondary education for the little red schoolhouse type of training is of vast moment to America. Rural horizons are being pushed back.

The twenty miles that once represented a day's journey in the farmer's little world are now less than an hour's spin. The broadening experience that travel brings ; the development of judgment and decision that automobile driving requires; the spread of mechanical knowledge that car maintenance entails: the demand for initiative and enterprise in those who would own and operate an automobile, are giving to the American people a training the value of which cannot be estimated in dollars and cents.

Many a wise leader of industry has sensed the significance of car ownership by his employees, and is encouraging them to buy homes where houses are detached and where they can own cars. The president of the Baldwin Locomotive works has told his men that he wants all of them to have initiative enough to own cars.

ELEVEN OUT OP EVERY THIRTEEN MOTOR CARS IN THE WORLD REGISTERED HERE

What people could appreciate and capitalize the advantage of the motor car so well as those of America? Their wealth is more widely distributed than that of any other nation; their average income is equaled nowhere else on the planet; furthermore, they have an unexcelled genius for quantity production. It is these facts that are responsible for eleven out of every thirteen motor vehicles in the world being operated on American roads, and for twelve out of every thirteen produced in a given period being Yankee-made.

Surveying motor-car registration, we find that South Carolina has more cars than Australia or Argentina ; that Kansas has more than France or Germany ; that Michigan has more than Great Britain and Ireland.

Indeed, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland, with a combined population smaller than Poland, and with an aggregate area more limited than New Mexico, have more automobiles in service than the whole world outside of the United States.

Even the District of Columbia has more motor vehicles than Austria, Belgium, Brazil, South Africa, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, India, Japan, Jugo-Slavia, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, or Switzerland.

In a group of twenty-eight major cities of the country, there are more cars stolen annually, even, than are used in Austria, Belgium, Japan, or Mexico.

The insatiable demand for new cars, in spite of the tremendous number al-ready in service, is disclosed by the fact that many more will be called into commission this year than were built from the birth of the industry up to the end of 1915.

Available figures indicate that the total car sales for the year will approximate five millions, including two million used vehicles. This means that one family out of every four in the country annually figures in an automobile transaction.

BOOKS COME BY MOTOR TO GLADDEN THE LIVES OF THE COUNTRY CHILDREN

Many counties are introducing a motorized circulating library service for the rural districts.

A VIEW OF CHARLES STREET, BOSTON, WITH THE COMMON ON THE RIGHT AND THE PUBLIC GARDEN ON THE LEFT

The passing of the day of putting down the tops of touring cars is to be noted wherever cars are parked.

DROP-FORGING A FRONT AXLE

After the heat treatment the axle ingot comes to this big, four-ton hammer and is forged into shape. This machine can be so delicately operated that it can be made to tap a watch without breaking the crystal.

A REMINDER OT THE TIME WHEN GRAIN WAS SOWN BROADCAST

Handpower gave way before horsepower a generation ago; and now, in its turn, horsepower is facing a formidable rival in tractor power.

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