acuum and when it has killed employment,
opens a bureau of unemployment and issues a report on the depression of
industry.

Now, the only way to restore prosperity is to give back again to the
individual the opportunity to make money, to make lots of it, and when
he has got it, to keep it. In spite of all the devastation of the war
the raw assets of our globe are hardly touched. Here and there, as in
parts of China and in England and in Belgium with about seven hundred
people to the square mile, the world is fairly well filled up. There is
standing room only. But there are vast empty spaces still. Mesopotamia
alone has millions of acres of potential wheat land with a few Arabs
squatting on it. Canada could absorb easily half a million settlers a
year for a generation to come. The most fertile part of the world, the
valley of the Amazon, is still untouched: so fertile is it that for tens
of thousands of square miles it is choked with trees, a mere tangle
of life, defying all entry. The idea of our humanity sadly walking the
streets of Glasgow or sitting mournfully fishing on the piers of the
Hudson, out of work, would be laughable if it were not for the pathos of
it.

The world is out of work for the simple reason that the world has
killed the goose that laid the golden eggs of industry. By taxation, by
legislation, by popular sentiment all over the world, there has been
a disparagement of the capitalist. And all over the world capital is
frightened. It goes and hides itself in the form of an investment in a
victory bond, a thing that is only a particular name for a debt, with no
productive effort behind it and indicating only a dead weight of taxes.
There capital sits like a bull-frog hidden behind water-lilies, refusing
to budge.

Hence the way to restore prosperity is not to multiply government
departments and government expenditures, nor to appoint commissions
and to pile up debts, but to start going again the machinery of bold
productive effort. Take off all the excess profits taxes and the
super-taxes on income and as much of the income tax itself as can be
done by a wholesale dismissal of government employees and then
give industry a mark to shoot at. What is needed now is not the
multiplication of government reports, but corporate industry, the
formation of land companies, development companies, irrigation
companies, any kind of corporation that will call out private capital
from its hiding places, offer empl