conditions favorable to such epidemics, was not misplaced. It was of the right kind.

Builders, investors, and speculators must assume certain risks, and some of these risks will be due to their opinion as to the realty growth of the section in which they have invested. For guideposts for the future most people look to the past.

Real-estate history shows unquestionably that the opportunities for real-estate success are to-day just as great as they were years ago, if not greater. The country is growing, times are prosperous, the majority of people are happy, and science and art are continually winning new laurels. Where are the signs that times will soon be bad, and that the upgrowth of the country is to receive a serious setback? Nowhere, absolutely nowhere.

It is not easy to answer the question of why these times present opportunities in realty fields equal to, if not better than, the earlier young days of the market. A man who sets out on a journey must have faith in his ability to reach his destination and to accomplish his object. Without confidence in his own prowess he would be poorly prepared to do what he hopes and expects to do, and his lack of faith in himself might bring ruin. The old and young men who think that the city or country has been overbuilt, and that the opportunities for success in realty fields are small, should turn their attention to some other line of business. In their very make-up they are unfitted to be part or parcel of the realty market.

Many years ago, when Twenty-third Street was considered to be a long distance north of the heart of New York City, the owner of a large tract of land at Gramercy · Park decided to improve his property or to take steps looking to such an improvement. The northward growth then was slow-so slow, in fact, that extraordinary meas

ures had to be used to quicken the movement. One of these measures was to offer titles to small parcels free and clear, if the one who received the title would swear that he would build a house for his own occupancy on the property, or would improve it in such a way as to enhance its value. This is taken from the writings of some of those who lived in those days and who wrote about the conditions existing then. They show how little confidence was placed by the general public on an early and profitable development of what was then the outskirts of the city. The lack of confidence may have been largely due to the poor transit facilities. Trolley and elevated-railroad lines and cable roads were unknown in those days. With these vehicles of locomotion, towns and villages which not long ago were thought to be a great distance from the center of the city are within easy reach. Moreover, the cost of journeying to them is much less than it was some years ago. Owing to these facts, the demand for lots in nearby towns and villages is considerably greater than when it was a long, tedious, and costly trip to get to them. The demand for property in the suburbs is growing rapidly, and the value of the real estate of the towns and villages has risen to unexpected marks in recent years.

Similar conditions prevail throughout the country. Remote villages, towns, and cities have been brought close together by means of trolley lines or better railroad facilities. Every such improvement, except in those instances where a rapacious railroad company has laid railroad or trolley tracks on a road or avenue which should never have been used for such purposes, has had a general beneficial effect on real estate. Who can say how much closer towns and cities will be brought by future developments of the trolley and railroad systems, and especially by the automobile?

A well-known man of conservative mind recently said that he thought it would not be many years before there was an almost unbroken line of splendidly built houses along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Florida, or, in other words, a city extending from the north to the south limits of the country. The same writer also said that it would not be long before the whole of Long Island was thickly populated.

These brilliant pictures of the future may be full of false colors, and therefore practically worthless. But it is selfevident that large tracts of land are only just being opened up by the building of trolley lines and railroads and by the offering of cheaper fares. The better towns and cities are united by this means, the greater becomes, under ordinary conditions, the business life of the places affected. Has the business of any city or town been known to have decreased on account of the extending of trolley or railroad lines so as to tap outlying districts? No such case can be recalled. In this real-estate prosperity of the future it is almost a certainty that young men will share largely, and will be well paid in a financial sense.

THE BOOT AND SHOE INDUSTRY1

BY WILLIAM R. STEWART

REVIOUS to 1845, when the first leatherrolling machine was applied to American shoemaking, this industry was, in the strictest sense, a hand process. Now, hands come

into play only in the guiding of machinery. In no other branch of manufacturing has there been so strikingly displayed the remarkable progress of the present age.

Yet shoemaking can take rank as one of America's oldest industries. For it is a fact of record that the good ship "Mayflower," in 1629, brought to these shores one Thomas Beard, a shoemaker, with a supply of hides and a document accrediting him to the governor of the colony at a salary of ten pounds per annum and a grant of fifty acres of land. Ten years later, another cobbler from England, one Philip Kertland, came over and set up a shoemaker's bench at Lynn, in Massachusetts, famous in the years to come as the greatest shoe center in the world.

Statistics are lacking of the number of pairs of shoes which the Americans of half a century ago wore out in a year's travels, but in 1903 it required two hundred and sixty million pairs to go around. More than two hundred million pounds of hides were used to make the sole leather; three hundred million square feet of goatskins were employed in the uppers; fifteen million pounds of calfskins and kidskins were used, and one hundred and fifty million pounds of grain and other side leathers.

From "The Cosmopolitan Magazine." Copyright, 1905, by the International Magazine Company.

The shoemaker of fifty years ago was an all-round craftsman. He built his shoes, one at a time, from the first hand-cutting of the leather to the final hand-driving of the completing peg. He spent seven years in apprenticeship before he began to make shoes on his own account.

More perfectly fitting shoes can be made to order by machinery now than the most skillful shoemaker of the past could produce by hand. In its early stages the factory system treated all human feet alike, but now a person may have his foot measured and drawn at a local dealer's, the drawing and measurements sent to a factory, perhaps thousands of miles away, and the shoe comes back built entirely by machinery and fitting like a glove.

When an order for a pair of these specially made shoes is received at a factory, it is entered on the books and a number is given to it. A tag is made out with a full description of the shoe required, as to size, quality of leather, thickness of sole, and other particulars. The leather selected, the tag is sent to the cutting room and placed on a board before a cutter, who, by means of a flat, brass-bound pattern which corresponds with the number and style indicated on the tag, cuts the vamp, or lower part of the shoe. Leather and tag then pass to a second cutter, who cuts the top, or quarter, and so on to the end, each workman cutting a different part.

From the cutting room the shoe is sent, with its tag, to the fitting or stitching room, and from there to the lasting room. From the laster's table it goes to a machine which cuts a channel in the insole, to which the upper is next sewed by machinery. Then the shank is tacked on, a filling is pressed in until the bottom is perfectly level, the welt is stitched around the outside of the insole, the sole is tacked on temporarily, and a machine trims the edges; then the sole is stitched to the welt, the heel is