plants and animals. Wonder-working nitrogenous fertilizers made at
Niagara and by the wave motors of the coast made all vegetation to
grow with artificial luxury. Corn-fed hogs and the rotund carcasses
of stall-fed cattle were produced on mammoth ranches for the
edification of mankind, and fowl were hatched by the billions in
huge incubators, and the chicks reared and slaughtered with scarcely
a touch of a human hand. And all this was under the control of
concentrated business organization. The old, sturdy, wasteful farmer
class had gone out of existence.

Only the rich who owned aeroplanes could afford to live in the
country. The poor had been forced to the cities where they could be
sheltered _en masse_, and fed, as it were, by machinery. New York
had a population of twenty-three millions. Manhattan Island had been
extended by filling in the shallows of the bay, until the Battery
reached almost to Staten Island. The aeroplane stations that topped
her skyscrapers stood, many of them, a quarter of a mile from the
ground.

As the materially greatest nation in the world, the United States
had an enormous national patriotism based on vanity. The larger
patriotism for humanity was only known in the prattle of her
preachers and idealists. America was the land of liberty--and
liberty had come to mean the right to disregard the rights of
others.

In Japan, too, there had been changes, but Japan had received the
gifts of science in a far different spirit. With her, science had
been made to serve the more ultimate needs of the race, rather than
the insane demand for luxuries.