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Show ! mass of tho people by reason of industrial stagnation and enforced idleness. While the American people are employed, their welfare is assured, but the most serious question is how to keep them employed. The waste of human energy in the United States is the one great problem for us to solve, and not that of land or prices. The resources of the United States are almost limitless, but our industrial organiation is sadly defective, so much so that at very best only a fraction of the possible productive efficiency of the American Amer-ican people is ever realized. The most disastrous period in our history and the one of greatest great-est suffering and want was between 1893 and 1897, when, though possessing all the raw material from which billions of dollars in food supplies and manufactured products have since been derived, the people of the United States stood still, industrially paralyzed, and literally rungry and ragged. We had land in abundance and prices at a minimum, but we iacked confidence and as a result there was a fearful waste of human energy that and nothing more. To so regulate our industrial and commercial affairs as to keep the people employed calls for more profound thought than any crisis which Murray Butler may conjure up. WHAT AILS THIS COUNTRY? The president of Columbia university, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, is much perturbed over the census figures. He sees iri the rapid growth of this country and the loss of population in Iowa, and the failure of Ohio and Illinois to advance, a grave crisis, involving involv-ing the future happiness of the American people. Dr. Butler says there must be more conservation of our resources and a redaction in the cost of living or this nation will take its place with the over-populated over-populated countres of Asia. He says population is overcrowding the 1 land. The president of Columbia is unduly alarmed over the land problem. There is not a farming region in all the West that cannot sustain double its present population. The western farmer is not a careful fanner, devoted to intensive cultivation of the soil, because there is no urgent demand for him to be other than what he is, the beneficiary of a wonderfully fertile, virgin soil. When the time comes for the great areas under cultivation in the West to produce a3 do the lands of Germany or Italy or France, the western farmer will prove equal to the task. There is more tillable land in the mtermountain country, untouched un-touched by plow or harrow, than is now under cultivation. .Some aay, as increasing population forces new conditions, the cultivator of the soil will appropriate this unused land and make it serve the wants of mankind-High mankind-High prices are not a source of peril Prices the worid over are nothing more than a measure of comparative worth. In China, where eggs can be bought for three cents a dozen and a coolie must work half a day to obtain the three cents, the price of eggs, when com-pared com-pared with wages, is as high as in the United Stales. The only ef, feet of high prices is a scaling down of the purchasing power of fixed incomes, whether from dividends, interest charges or salaries Prices can remain high only so long as the people have the purchaa-ing purchaa-ing power to continue to be tho consumers they are today. The most serious problem before us as a people is not that of lands or prices, but of industrial instability growing out of our crude system cf governmental control of large combinations of capital. Our monetary system allows of extremes in abundance and scarcity scar-city ormoney with which to do business, the plethora of funds causing infht:cr 3t" tV of credit bringing prostration, both tending to disastrous Uuiiness upsets, with inevitable misfortune for the great |