“Now lads, I venture to tell you that I think you will live to see the day when tracked vehicles will supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in roadless countries; when armies will be moved across country and roadless traction will become the chief means of commercial movement in all undeveloped lands. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a farmer or soldier to use a tracked machine than to travel by rail.” As it took Mahomet three years to collect thirteen followers, I shall not be downcast if I collect no greater a number out of the readers of this book, because perseverance was the motto of Mahomet as well as of Stephenson, and as perseverance won them their battles, may it win me mine. Many will consider my prophecy ridiculous, and a multitude of Henry Herberts will foam at the mouth. Protean ignorance is against me—a resilient Everest of oiled rubber. A hundred years ago it was boisterously hostile to novelty, to-day it is somnolently apathetic, and, in this latter mood, it is almost more overpowering than in the former. Nevertheless, let us smile, let us take off our coats and climb this glutinous mountain, for the Elysian fields lie beyond. A few years ago we were told that, once the war was won, this little island of ours was going to be fit for heroes to live in, as if any country ever had been or could be an Eldorado after a great war! To-day, we have well over a million unemployed men and women in this country, and I have no doubt there are many heroes and heroines amongst them; certainly the conditions demand an heroic race to win through. Our present difficulties all boil down to one recognizable sediment. Great Britain is over-populated. Before the war we were over-populated, and to-day we are still more so, and to-morrow matters are likely to be worse.[1] There are three solutions to this problem. Either we must stop breeding, or we must create new home industries and so absorb our surplus population, or we must transport it to less thickly populated areas overseas. Footnote 1: In 1913, 700,000 emigrated from this country; in 1923, only 463,000 left. Six hundred and odd politicians in Westminster, some in black ties and others in red, chatter like a wilderness of monkeys, whilst those who were proclaimed heroes may consider themselves lucky if they are allowed to stand in the gutter and sell bootlaces; and in this chatter the problem is drowned, only to bob up again, between each breath.