Explore "The Ghost Planet" by Murray Leinster on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A hundred years of peace and preventive medicine had sent Earth's population soaring. From two billion people in the early twentieth century it was now eight and a quarter billion. In a world-wide culture of high development there could be neither plagues nor wars to ease the pressure. But the pressure was enormous.
The Guilds arose to meet it -- grim associations of individuals, at once unions and fraternal organizations, which watched jealously over the rights of their members and helped them by cooperative housing and merchandising activities to meet the increasingly desperate pressure of overcrowding.