I have, I think, quoted enough to show that there is no natural obstacle to our production in this country of all the food our people need. Britain can feed herself, and therefore, upon the ground of her use for foreign-grown food, the factory system is not necessary.
But I hope my readers will buy this book of Prince Kropotkin, and read it. For it is a very fine book, a much better book than I can write.
It can be ordered from the Clarion Office, 72 Fleet Street, and the price is 1s. 3d. post free.
As to the vegetables and the fruit, I must refer you to the Prince's book; but I shall quote a few passages just to give an idea of what can be done, and is being done, in other countries in the way of intensive cultivation of vegetables and fruit.
Prince Kropotkin says that the question of soil is a common stumbling-block to those who write about agriculture. Soil, he says, does not matter now, nor climate very much. There is a quite new science of agriculture which makes its own soil and modifies its climate. Corn and fruit can be grown on any soil—on rock, on sand, on clay.
Man, not Nature, has given to the Belgian soil its present productivity.
And now read this—
While science devotes its chief attention to industrial pursuits, a limited number of lovers of Nature, and a legion of workers whose very names will remain unknown to posterity, have created of late quite a new agriculture, as superior to modern farming as modern farming is superior to the old three-fields system of our ancestors.... Science seldom has guided them; they proceeded in the empirical way; but like the cattle-growers who opened new horizons to biology, they have opened a new field of experimental research for the physiology of plants. They have created a totally new agriculture. They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops each three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of land during the twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they make the soil themselves, and make it in such quantities as to be compelled yearly to sell some of it: otherwise it would raise up the level of their gardens by half an inch every year. They aim at cropping, not five or six tons of grass on the acre, as we do, but from fifty to a hundred tons of vegetables on the same space; not £5 worth of hay, but £100 worth of vegetables of the plainest description—cabbage and carrots.
Look now at these figures from America—
At a recent competition, in which hundreds of farmers took part, the first ten prizes were awarded to ten farmers who had grown, on three acres each, from 262 to 346¾ bushels of Indian corn; in other words, from 87 to 115 bushels to the acre. In Minnesota the prizes were given for crops of 300 to 1120 bushels of potatoes to the acre, i.e. from 8¼ to 31 tons to the acre, while the average potato crop in Great Britain is only 6 tons.