The Winton Company, which conducts a sort of private Automobile Humane Society, offers prizes for chauffeurs who can show the greatest mileage on the lowest charge for upkeep.  The first prize winner in the contest for the eight months ending June 30, 1909, drove his car 17,003 miles with no expense whatever for up-keep.  The second prize winner drove 11,000 miles at an outlay of thirty cents, while the third man drove 10,595 miles without any expense.  This makes a total of 38,598 miles by three cars at a cost of thirty cents for repairs.  And all the cars were two years old when the contest began.

The moral for those who really want to see what an automobile can do is obvious.

ISAAC F. MARCOSSON

Every automobile that you see is a link in a chain of steel and power which, if stretched out, would reach from New York to St. Louis.  What was considered a freak fifteen years ago, and a costly toy within the present decade, is now a necessity in business and pleasure.  A mechanical Cinderella, once rejected, despised, and caricatured, has become a princess.

Few people realize the extent of her sway.  Hers is perhaps the only industry whose statistics of to-day are obsolete to-morrow, so rapid is its growth.  In 1895 the value of the few hundred cars produced in the United States was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; in 1910 the year’s output of approximately two hundred thousand machines was worth two hundred and twenty-five millions.  Behind them is a stalwart business representing, with parts and accessory makers, an investment of more than a billion and a quarter of dollars.  Four hundred thousand men, or more than five times the strength of our standing army, depend upon it for a livelihood, and more than five millions of people are touched or affected by it every day.

Through its phenomenal expansion new industries have been created and old ones enriched.  It withstood panic and rode down depression; it has destroyed the isolation of the farm and made society more intimate.  There is a car for every one hundred and sixty persons in the United States; twenty-five States have factories; the honk of the horn on the American car is heard around the world.

Such, in brief, is the miracle of the motor’s advance.  Its development is a real epic of action and progress.

Before going further, it might be well to ask why and how the automobile has achieved such a remarkable development.  One reason, perhaps, is that it appeals to vanity and stirs the imagination.  A man likes to feel that by a simple pressure of the hand he can control a ton of quivering metal.  Besides, we live, work, and have our being in a breathless age, into which rapid transit fits naturally.  So universal is the impress of the automobile that there are in reality but two classes of people in the United States to-day—­those who own motor-cars and those who do not.