predominates, such as southern California, Arizona, northern Mexico, the Sahara desert, Egypt, Arabia, Tartary, Central Australia, etc. In all such countries railroads are operated at nominal expense. “Stations at intervals transmit the power several hundred miles on either side. As there is practically no limit to this power it has come to be used for the accomplishment of undertakings that were hardly dreamed of before. The irrigation and development of deserts by means of artesian wells and by streams brought from a distance, followed by the construction of roads, settlement and cultivation are being vigorously prosecuted in all parts where the climate is not too cold. Large tracts notably in the Sahara and Gobi deserts and in Arabia and Tartary, have already been made productive and populous. This power can be conveyed to great distances from the point where it is developed, and made to do work in places practically inaccessible to any other form of power. Excavation of canals, railway cuts, tunnels and mines with the transportation of materials for embankments is prosecuted with tremendous energy. Innumerable mines are being pushed far into the bowels of the earth and the interior explored and honeycombed in many directions. This work is however destined to be of vastly more importance in the distant future than at the present. But I think you can now see that with practically unlimited power and unlimited raw materials for the construction of the human race placed in the hands of the race itself your fears that the increase of population will ever press uncomfortably on the means of subsistence are not well founded.” “Yes I do begin to see that,” said I. “It is all very wonderful. What a career the race has before it! Why it has hardly got out of its cradle yet. What a misfortune that I was not reserved to be born two or three centuries later so I could see some of these future glories!” “Nay, nay,” he replied, “that is a vain wish. You may be as happy in your own time as you could be in the future. In all the ages of the past, people have been found expressing a poor opinion of their own times, extolling the golden age that was past or the millennium that was to come; and it will be so in the future. If you were to live two centuries hence you would see as many defects and shortcomings, and anticipate as many still future improvements and achievements as you did in your day.” “Well, I suppose, that must be so; and yet with such an apparently absolute control over the earth it would seem that mankind might make themselves comfortable and contented.” CHAPTER IX. The Problem of Over Population.