The writer may fail in his purpose with this paper, but he will not have written in vain if he can lead a few men to see the pitiful folly of that half-baked theory which ranks men with the wild beasts of the jungle, and ignores the existence of both science and morality. He can do that, assuredly, with any one whom he can induce to read one little book—Prince Kropotkin’s “Fields, Factories and Workshops.”
The book was published nine years ago, but apparently it has not yet had time to affect the cogitations of the orthodox economists. You still read, as you have been used to reading since the days of Adam Smith, that the possibilities of the soil are strictly limited, and that population always stays just within the starvation limit. Nearly all the fertile land in this country, for instance, is now in use, and so we shall soon reach the limit here. The forty million people of Great Britain have long since passed it, and they would starve to death were it not for our surplus. And there are portions of the world where population is even more dense, as in Belgium. All this you have known from your school-days, and you think you know it perfectly, and beyond dispute; and so how astonished you will be to be told that it is simply one of the most stupid and stupefying delusions that ever were believed and propagated among men; that the limits of the productive possibilities of the soil have not only not been attained, but are, so far as science can now see, absolutely unattainable; that not only could England support with ease her own population on her own soil, and not only could Belgium do it, but any most crowded portion of the world could do it, and do it once again, and yet once again, and do it with two or three hours of work a day by a small portion of its population! That England could now support, not merely her thirty-three million inhabitants, but seventy-five and perhaps a hundred million! And that the United States could now support a billion and a quarter of people, or just about the entire population of this planet! And that this could be done year after year, and entirely without any possibility of the exhaustion of the soil! And all this not any theory of a closet speculator or a Utopian dreamer, but by methods that are used year after year by thousands and tens of thousands of men who are making money by it in all portions of the world—in the market-gardens of Paris and London, of Belgium, Holland and the island of Jersey, the truck-farms of Florida and Minnesota, and of Norfolk, Virginia!
Prince Kropotkin writes:
“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 a quite new agriculture, as superior to modern farming as modern farming is superior to the old three-fields system of our ancestors. They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops every three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of land every 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 levels of their gardens by half an inch every year. They aim at cropping, not five or six tons of grass to the acre, as we do, but from fifty to one hundred tons of various vegetables on the same space; not twenty-five dollars’ worth of hay, but five hundred dollars’ worth of vegetables, of the plainest description, cabbages and carrots. That is where agriculture is going now.”
The writer tells about all these things in detail. Here is the culture maraîchere of Paris—a M. Ponce, with a tiny orchard of two and seven-tenths acres, for which he pays five hundred dollars rent a year, and from which he takes produce that could not be named short of several pages of figures: twenty thousand pounds of carrots, twenty thousand of onions and radishes, six thousand heads of cabbage, three thousand of cauliflower, five thousand baskets of tomatoes, five thousand dozen choice fruit, one hundred and fifty-four thousand heads of “salad”—in all, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds of vegetables. Says the author:
“The Paris gardener not only defies the soil—he would grow the same crops on an asphalt pavement—he defies climate. His walls, which are built to reflect light and to protect the wall-trees from the northern winds, his wall-tree shades and glass protectors, his pépinières, have made a rich Southern garden out of the suburbs of Paris.”
The consequence of this is that the population of the districts of that city, three millions and a half of people, could, if it were necessary, be maintained in their own territory, provided with food both animal and vegetable, from a piece of ground less than sixty miles on a side! And at the same time, by the same methods, they are raising thirty tons of potatoes on an acre in Minnesota, and three hundred and fifty bushels of corn in Iowa, and six hundred bushels of onions in Florida. And with machinery, on the prairie wheat-farms, they raise crops at a cost which makes twelve hours and a half of work of all kinds enough to supply a man with the flour part of his food for a year! And then, as if to cap the climax, comes Mr. Horace Fletcher with his discovery that all the ailments of civilised man, (including old age and death) are due to overeating; and Professor Chittenden with his practical demonstration that the quantity of food needed by man is about four-tenths of what all physiologists have previously taught! [[2]]And while all this has been going on for a decade, while encyclopedias have been written about it, our political economists continue to discuss wages and labour, rent and interest, exchange and consumption, from the standpoint of the dreary, century-old formula that there must always be an insufficient supply of food in the world!
[2]. Horace Fletcher: “The A-B-Z of Our Own Nutrition.” R. L. Chittenden: “Physiological Economy in Nutrition.”
Courtesy of Wilshire’s Magazine