“Yes, Leacraft,” interrupted Thomsen, “I feel better to hear you talk this way, but I must look at some very disagreeable facts, too. They are not easily eliminated by words or fancies, and even seem to evince a provoking facility to become more numerous, the more they are considered. Take the mechanical problem of transportation. We are some forty millions of people. The extravagant powers of assimilation of the United States barely digests the one million of emigrants that come to their shores each year; what conceivable powers of absorption will dispose of our forty millions without an attack of industrial _gastritis_ that will induce the worst political convulsions. And the carrying skill and capacity of our whole merchant marine cannot in less than ten years take away this monstrous human cargo, together with all the colossal accumulation of paraphernalia, stocks, chattels, goods, treasures, books and belongings, that have gathered in this rich island, until they seem like a sort of pactolian alluvium that is indigenous and irremovable. Think of the women, the children! What method of domiciliation will you devise to accommodate these armies? And with this removal comes the crash of all domestic values, railroad stock, gas stock, mill stock, warehouses, land values, everything goes with the removal of the human vitality that gives them worth. It staggers the imagination to think how the disorganization radiates and increases in all directions. In 1905–6 this Great Britain consumed in one industry alone nearly four millions of bales of cotton, spun them out into merchantable goods on her fifty million spindles. Do you measure the almost unfathomable depths of distress the stoppage of this one industry means? Is it not better to fight it out here, to defeat Nature, if I may be allowed to copy your own enthusiasm, to put on our own heads the regalia of the Ice King, and _rule him_, wrest from him his own sceptre, and excel his power with the power of this new century of invention?”