One Who Does Not
p. 32 · Read in the full issue
Expect Tourists in Pacific
FROM an esteemed correspondent (an American) in Polynesia: I smiled while reading your forecast of heavy tourist traffic in the Pacific in 1947.
So far as one may peer into the future, the restless people in my country will be more actively engaged in burrowing underground to escape Russian atomic rockets, coming over the North Pole than in thinking of beckoning isles any where in the Seven Seas.
In the event that Russia shall have been appeased, the cumulative conse quences of a weak, bewildered Adminis tration at Washington; arrogant Labour leaders; the staggering national debt; an awakening to the impending exhaus tion of our high-grade iron ore and petroleum reserves; markets glutted with useless gadgets; and a perpetual menace in unstable foreign relations — these will have descended upon our USA within the next twelve months The New York >share market fore shadows something of this nature in the not distant future.
The old legend of Phaeton driving the sun was really a prophecy, which is coming to pass in our day.
Archaeologists of the Orang-outang Civilisation —500,000 years hence —will probably reconstruct such a legend to account for the charred and twisted debris they will find when excavating the habitation sites of mankind.
The currencies of the world are—in this age of progress—based on a vacuum —that absolute scientists had •despaired of attaining by means of ap paratus hitherto contrived.
Some of us may be pardoned if we are moderately pessimistic.