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The most eloquent passages in The Crisis of the Middle Class are those in which the author pictures the present plight of the U. S. middle class. "Large numbers of small producers, storekeepers and independent professionals are always killed off by depression. But mere assassination now becomes massacre. In only three years of the depression, from 1930 to 1932, 578,000 independent enterprisers in industry, trade and the professions, were driven out of business: one out of six. The massacre is still on; the survivors tremble." Lewis Corey sets the low point of unemployment among salaried employes at 35% of the total. In 1933. 65% of all U. S. chemists were out of work, 85% of all engineers, over 90% of all architects and draftsmen. Analyzed in terms of goods and services that might have been produced if prosperity had not broken down, "there was, in the five years of depression 1930-34, a loss of $185,000 million. . . . This is stupendous and unparalleled, almost ungraspable in its immensity. . . . There never was economic waste on this gigantic scale." Lewis Corey holds that Fascism is no answer, but middle-class readers, visualizing the grim alternatives before them, are likely to experience despair, implore, like Milton's Satan as he stumbled toward the Pit: "Which way the neerest coast of darkness lyes?"