We have an overgrowth, or, rather, too sudden and rank a growth, of transportation in America. It is attended with sudden changes, attended also with a certain weediness and immaturity, which we should be entitled to call un-American and undesirable, even were it not for the graver features that amount to revolutionary changes and to national menaces. Borne aloft upon a great wave of commercial prosperity, the American people is at the present time taking itself with entire seriousness as the greatest nation of the world. Its rapid industrial expansion has indeed been cause for marvel in the mind of all the world. There is a certain national comfort in these reflections, without doubt, and solace in the almost incomprehensible totals of the figures on which such assertions are grounded. Therefore it must come almost with ill grace to offer in these days of jubilation any word that might seem to indicate that perhaps, in spite of all this superficial prosperity, all may not be well with America as a nation, that all is not really well with our American man. We are told that these are good times, the best we ever knew. It is triumphantly announced to us that we have in one year invested nearly seventy millions of dollars in foreign securities, largely in railroad bonds of Russia, in German Treasury bills, and English Exchequer loans. This is very good; it sounds well. As an offset to it one should apologize for offering the simple but multifold statements from the columns of the daily press bearing upon the greater cost of living in Western states. It is seven per cent. greater, says one dealer in statistics. It is twenty-five per cent. greater than it ever was, says another. The housewives of America, the best of all statisticians, say that in 1902 it cost thirty-three per cent. more to live than it did in 1899. These prices of bare commodities in these days of super-excellent transportation go well toward comparing with those we have shown as existing in the far-off mountain communities in the days of pack-horse and ox-team transportation. If this be so, is all well with America? The prices are the results of combinations and monopolies. The monopolies are based largely on non-competitive transportation. The iron trails are built over the hearthfires of America. The iron trails must do otherwise than thus. We are informed that during the last year the balance of trade in favor of the United States was something like seven hundred millions of dollars. “Figures up to March twenty-first (1902), just finished,” says a careful report, “are so stupendous as to be staggering. * * * Nations have generally measured their prosperity by their foreign trade.”