ss 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.

It must be kept in mind, too, in analyzing the causes of the
automobile's amazing expansion, that it is the first real improvement
in individual transportation since the chariot rattled around the Roman
arena. The horse had his century-old day, but when the motor came man
traded him for a gas-engine.

Characteristic of the pace at which the automobile has traveled to
success is the somewhat astonishing fact that while it took inventive
genius nearly fifty years to develop a locomotive that would run fifty
miles an hour on a speciall