The pages of history had been turned rapidly in those years.  The United States, long known as the richest country, had also become the most populous nation of the Caucasian world—­and wealth and population had made her vain.

But with all her material glory, there was not strength in American sinews, nor endurance in her lungs, nor vigor in the product of her loins.  Her people were herded together in great cities, where they slept in gigantic apartment houses, like mud swallows in a sand bank.  They overate of artificial food that was made in great factories.  They over-dressed with tight-fitting unsanitary clothing made by the sweated labor of the diseased and destitute.  They over-drank of old liquors born of ancient ignorance and of new concoctions born of prostituted science.  They smoked and perfumed and doped with chemicals and cosmetics—­the supposed virtues of which were blazoned forth on earth and sky day and night.

The wealth of the United States was enormous, yet it was chiefly in the hands of the few.  The laborers went forth from their rookeries by subway and monorail, and served their shifts in the mills of industry.

In turn, others took their places, and the mills ground night and day.

Even the farm lands had been largely taken over by corporate control.  Crops on the plains were planted with power machinery.  The rough lands had all been converted into forests or game preserves for the rich.  Agriculture had been developed as a science, but not as a husbandry.  The forcing system had been generally applied to 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.