The conversation was interrupted: Baron Malhof joined them, and so it became three-cornered. And then the young American began to speak, and all stopped talking and listened.
His first words were:—“I bring gifts!”—then he made a brief pause:—“A cornucopia of gifts: immeasurable riches for you, for all the world!”
Again he paused for a while, and just as he began, so he continued his discourse in paragraphs separated by brief pauses, and the paragraphs marked by concise sentences.
“You who will receive these gifts will not exult like children around a Christmas tree. Children receive what they comprehend, what they have been wanting, what they immediately use. The new things that I bring will be slow in becoming understood: likewise slow in spreading and winning appreciation. Many will indifferently push them aside; many will even resist them. Whatever destroys the beaten track—the customary habits of thought and of action—people avoid. A Japanese proverb says: ‘An evil which has lasted two years becomes a necessity.’
“I bring riches. But our society is schooled to poverty and want; it is built up on these. Especially for the rich, their existence seems indispensable. Performance of the baser necessary functions, stimulus to progress: on this the social usefulness of poverty is founded; opportunity for the preaching of contentment, for the giving of alms, so certain to bring one to heaven—these advantages of poverty are becomingly treasured by the rich. When I tell these rich men that there can be riches for all, this disturbs their circle, and they reply indignantly: ‘Sheer fancy! Utopia! Humbug!’ The poor and wretched are not quite so entranced with the advantages and amenities of poverty which appeal so forcibly to the well-to-do. And whenever they do not belong to the great majority of the dully resigned, they strive to remedy it by planning a new division of the property extant, or a change in the economic system.
“You all know what this attempt is called. But do not be alarmed—I am not going to preach socialism. Division and control of property belong to another field. Here I am speaking of the increase of property: an increase so infinitely great that it leaves no place at all for want.
“Possibly, by application of common sense and justice, it might be feasible, even with the materials in our possession, to banish wretchedness from the world. Whether the existing unreason and injustice would not maintain poverty even when superabundance were obtained—who knows? Certainly not for any length of time.
“More than ten years ago, the tidings of Luther Burbank’s miracles in the cultivation of plants was communicated to the world. This man succeeded in cultivating, on his lonely California farm, varieties of vegetables and fruits of a size never before known, and he managed to rid of its spines a kind of cactus which grows in the most arid sands of the desert and so make it edible for man and beast.
“Does not that sound like a dry botanical fact, interesting only to a few truck-gardeners, but sure to leave the great mass of the people indifferent? The world did remain unmoved: a couple of illustrated articles in family magazines, causing a few readers to shake their heads dubiously,—‘Strawberries as big as a child’s head, stoneless plums, spineless cactuses—remarkable!’—and then it was all forgotten.
“Would you not have thought there would be a cry of jubilation from one end of the world to the other: ‘What—we can compel Nature to new gifts, we can bring forth provender and food in such quantities! We can make the deserts and rocky soil to provide us with such cheap harvests that the evil demons, Hunger and Famine, will be banished forever from the earth!’ No, the readers of the family magazines did not see so far.