Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: geographer is the strenuous geographer, and this one has made himself a practical incarnation of the principle of making two blades of grass grow where one grew before, without letting any grow under his feet. Just now he is to try a new geographical role. He is becoming an explorer in Africa before he is to become your distinguished guest at this University, and, I hope, of this School of Geography. It is also said that he is going lion-hunting. So far his special animosity has been the bear. He has hitherto shown no special grudge against the lion, especially of the British variety. But if he does not make some new and striking contributions to geographical dynamics in Africa before he returns this way, those who know him will miss their guess. Situation The first decade of the twentieth century, or, roughly speaking, the administration of President Roosevelt, found the economic situation in the United States a most extraordinary and interesting one. This situation discloses some of the problems which his administration has had to face boldly, and for which it had to offer solutions. Perhaps one of the first things that strikes the observer, if he gets far enough away to take a bird's- eye view, is the chaos both in the economic and political conditions of the entire country; the anarchy which prevailed among certain people and over certain areas ; the mad and unintelligent scramble to get possession of the rawTnaterials and natural resources of the nation ; the prodigious waste which attended the scramble for theseresources, and their concentration and final centralization and congestion in a few pairs of hands ; finally culminating in the stock-gamblers' panic of last year, whose evil effects have been felt by every man in the civilized world. This panic was brough...