See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field the Lord has blessed. God give thee of the dew of the heaven and the fatness of the earth and plenty of wine and corn.
The cornucopia, horn of plenty, never contained a fabricated thing—only the fruits of the earth.
That old meaning of the word has been recently lost. Modernly we speak of ‘goods’; we talk of the standard of living, which is understood of course to include proper quantities of food, and to mean, besides food, an endless number of artificial things which people increasingly require for their comfort and well-being.
Mechanical energy does not produce food. Nor has the principle of limited fecundity that governs the earth been suspended. Yet the machine has enormously increased the food-supply in two ways: first, agriculture is equipped with power—tools, so that one man now may perform the labour of many; second, transportation has made all the food-producing areas of the world accessible, so that grain from the middle of the North American continent and grain from Argentina are mingled unawares in the European loaf.
This use of the machine to distribute food swiftly over the whole world from where there is a surplus to where that surplus is needed has had profound political, economic, and social consequences, beginning with an increase of the human species vastly beyond any number that had at any time previously existed or could ever before have been sustained upon the earth. That is the one most awesome phenomenon of the industrial era. The North American continent has been peopled from European stock. Its present population is equal to that of all Europe in 1800. This drain of emigration notwithstanding, the population of Europe in the same time has trebled.
And still there is plenty.
Where it is not actual, it is potential. Who have not plenty are either too inert or too ignorant to put forth the modern effort. What people may use, enjoy, and consume now is an x quantity, determined neither by the rhythms of nature nor any biological principle, but simply by the free total of their own exertions.
Faster than the race has multiplied the powers of the machine have increased. One of these is the power of transportation, whereby the food product of the whole earth is made uniformly available. The other power is represented by a divisible product of artificial things tending to exceed the sum of effective human desire.
To wishful desire there is no limit whatever; but there is a point at which the effort necessary to obtain the object—that is, the toil—will be weighed against the desire to possess it, and only when and if the object is deemed worth the effort is desire effective in the economic sense.
From the paradox mentioned—that tendency of the machine’s divisible product to overwhelm the sum of effective desire—we get a series of complex phenomena of which there is nowhere yet a complete understanding.