bile; on holidays the family motors to the country. Is this man interested in national, political, social, or economic problems? He is not. He is interested in making all he can now, while the making is good.

"Bolshevism?" he says. "I think it's mostly a lot of newspaper bunk. But if Bolshevism is coming, I guess it's up to me to make all I can before it arrives."

And making means spending.

There seems to be no immediate danger of an end to the opportunities for making. Once some very, very wise men set 1909 as the date of automobile "saturation." By that time, we were told, every one in the world who could possibly afford an automobile would have one, and the only thing necessary henceforth would be to manufacture enough cars to take the place of those that wore out. Then the saturation date was advanced to 1912, with appropriate explanations. The war advanced it still further. Now wiseacres equally wise fix 1921 or 1923 as the period of saturation.

But the automobile men I talked with in Detroit are n't so wisely sure as all that. When I asked Roy D. Chapin, president of the Hudson Company, about saturation, he drew my attention to the billions that will be spent on highways in America in the next ten years, "every mile of which will mean more cars and a greater intermingling of people," and then spoke of the export field "in which America will always be able to undersell foreign builders because our vast production will keep our costs down." When I asked Alvan Macauley, president of the Packard company, he called me to the window of his office and pointed to a whole city block adjoining his plant parked solidly with cars of every kind and price.

"Do you know whom those belong

to?" he asked. "Mechanics in this plant. The day is coming when every mechanic and every farmer and every professional man in this country will have his car." (All except editors, school-teachers, and preachers, I mentally reserved.) "That day is a long time off."

Yes, it is a long time off, even in America, to say nothing of Europe, and then Siberia, Nigeria, and Polynesia.

Automobiles and washing-machines and sealskin coats as antidotes for Bolshevism-this seems to have become the theme of my first letter. What is the significance of Detroit? Is all this halfsatisfying plenty in the midst of a world that has destroyed and wasted and underproduced only a strange local magic? Is the peculiar chance for profit in automobile production, in contrast to the food production and clothes production by which communities live, alone responsible? Yet the demand which makes automobile production profitable comes from the food-producers and clothes-producers of those other communities. Then what, if any, relationship is there between plenty in Detroit and want in Vienna? Are they facets of the same phenomenon? And what, if any, relationship is there between the things which force themselves upon me here these expensive, sometimes evilsmelling, but exceedingly comfortable things-to our dreams and our fierce concern over international policies and national ideals?

My next letter will treat of an altogether different phase of our life, as I find it now. In the meantime, from this city of conspicuous peace, I send you greeting. Who would have thought that four thousand miles or so of water and land could make me feel so far from the Avenue Gabriel!

Yours sincerely,

WEBB WALDRON.