Excerpt from The Theosophical Quarterly, Vol. 6

In the same strain we are told that the poor drink to forget their misery, spending a hundred million dollars a year to this end, in New York City alone. Surely with that sum they might cure some of their misery, were they so inclined. But we are told that once their conditions are better, they will cease to drink. And then we are invited to regard the spectacle of the iniquitous rich, swollen with insolence and wine! Surely this is to invoke miracles!

The argument from prophecy does not lag behind. On a Sunday evening, toward the close of May, we listened to a Socialistic eschatologist. He told us, with a quiet manner that was singularly refreshing, that we were not merely on the brink of calamity, but that calamity was already upon us. Humanity was stale-mated. Our inventions were our undoing. We had produced so much that things had come to a standstill, and the depression of last winter was the result of this over-production and the beginning of the end. This good orator, who has published several books on economics, then gave a concrete instance. He said that there would be no more railroad building; that there was no more room for railroads; that we had already got too many and were up against a dead wall. We admit that we were struck by this argument; so impressed, that we went and looked up the facts. At first, we found some corroboration of our orator. In England, with less than sixty thousand square miles of surface, we found there were some sixteen thousand miles of railways, say one mile of railway to every four square miles of territory. That seemed a good deal; and the fact that only some two hundred miles of railway are built in England yearly goes to show that there, at least, railroad building is close to its natural limit. So we can take England as the standard of a country pretty well complete in its railroad outfit.

Let us now apply our standard. The United States, with dependen cies, has about four million square miles of surface - we are taking round figures. On the English scale, this would call for a million miles of railroads. The United States has at present two hundred thousand, leaving eight hundred thousand yet to build before the English standard is reached. If we say that it has taken fifty years to build the existing American railroads, which is under the truth, it should take four times as long, or two hundred years, to complete our equipment. Yet we were gravely told that we were already at the end, fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf. That is the argument from prophecy, at its best.

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