The reason for the higher cost of living is to be found in the movement of the population, from the dulness of the plough to the sprightliness of the cinematograph. This choice every freeman has a right to make for himself, but the trouble arises when the politician comes forward and pays his admission to the cinematograph entertainment, out of the public funds, in order to get his vote. The man who does not leave the plough under those conditions is either a fool or a saint, and the percentage of the growth of cities is a fair measure of their relative numbers. The increased cost of living is the result, not of too much gold, but of too little labor on the land, and this is due, in turn, to the voluptuous rhetoric of the political street-walkers, whose promises of pleasure are as illegitimate as they are impossible of fulfilment. A debtor nation like Germany is highly sensitive to these conditions, and just as she is overcoming, by her splendid success as a manufacturing nation this problem, she is met by increased and ever-increasing rivalry. America, in 1901, exported $466,000,000 of manufactures; in 1891 only $188,000,000; but in 1911, $910,000,000; and in 1912, $1,021,753,918. We now have in America 225,000 manufacturing plants employing 6,000,000 people, with an annual pay-roll of $3,500,000,000 and producing every twelve months $15,000,000,000 worth of goods. The total value of exports and imports of Japan thirty years ago was $30,000,000, or 87 cents per capita; in 1911 the figures were $480,000,000, or $10 per capita. England during the years 1911 and 1912 surpassed all previous figures both for exports and imports. Germany's rivals, it is thus seen, have not been idle.