TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end of each chapter.

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.]

Fields, Factories
and
Workshops

OR

INDUSTRY COMBINED WITH AGRICULTURE
AND BRAIN WORK WITH MANUAL WORK

BY

P. KROPOTKIN

NEW, REVISED, AND ENLARGED EDITION

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1913

PREFACE.

Fourteen years have passed since the first edition of this book was published, and in revising it for this new edition I found at my disposal an immense mass of new materials, statistical and descriptive, and a great number of new works dealing with the different subjects that are treated in this book. I have thus had an excellent opportunity to verify how far the previsions that I had formulated when I first wrote this book have been confirmed by the subsequent economical evolution of the different nations.

This verification permits me to affirm that the economical tendencies that I had ventured to foreshadow then have only become more and more definite since. Everywhere we see the same decentralisation of industries going on, new nations continually entering the ranks of those which manufacture for the world market. Each of these new-comers endeavours to develop, and succeeds in developing, on its own territory the principal industries, and thus frees itself from being exploited by other nations, more advanced in their technical evolution. All nations have made a remarkable progress in this direction, as will be seen from the new data that are given in this book.

On the other hand, one sees, with all the great industrial nations, the growing tendency and need of developing at home a more intensive agricultural productivity, either by improving the now existing methods of extensive agriculture, by means of small holdings, “inner colonisation,” agricultural education, and co-operative work, or by introducing different new branches of intensive agriculture. This country is especially offering us at this moment a most instructive example of a movement in the said direction. And this movement will certainly result, not only in a much-needed increase of the productive forces of the nation, which will contribute to free it from the international speculators in food produce, but also in awakening in the nation a fuller appreciation of the immense value of its soil, and the desire of repairing the error that has been committed in leaving it in the hands of great land-owners and of those who find it now more advantageous to rent the land to be turned into shooting preserves. The different steps that are being taken now for raising English agriculture and for obtaining from the land a much greater amount of produce are briefly indicated in Chapter V.

It is especially in revising the chapters dealing with the small industries that I had to incorporate the results of a great number of new researches. In so doing I was enabled to show that the growth of an infinite variety of small enterprises by the side of the very great centralised concerns is not showing any signs of abatement. On the contrary, the distribution of electrical motive power has given them a new impulse. In those places where water power was utilised for distributing electric power in the villages, and in those cities where the machinery used for producing electric light during the night hours was utilised for supplying motive power during the day, the small industries are taking a new development.

In this domain I am enabled to add to the present edition the interesting results of a work about the small industries in the United Kingdom that I made in 1900. Such a work was only possible when the British Factory Inspectors had published (in 1898, in virtue of the Factories Act of 1895) their first reports, from which I could determine the hitherto unknown numerical relations between the great and the small industries in the United Kingdom.

Until then no figures whatever as regards the distribution of operatives in the large and small factories and workshops of Great Britain were available; so that when economists spoke of the “unavoidable” death of the small industries they merely expressed hypotheses based upon a limited number of observations, which were chiefly made upon part of the textile industry and metallurgy. Only after Mr. Whitelegge had published the first figures from which reliable conclusions could be drawn was it possible to see how little such wide-reaching conclusions were confirmed by realities. In this country, as everywhere, the small industries continue to exist, and new ones continue to appear as a necessary growth, in many important branches of national production, by the side of the very great factories and huge centralised works. So I add to the chapter on small industries a summary of the work that I had published in the Nineteenth Century upon this subject.

As regards France, the most interesting observations made by M. Ardouin Dumazet during his many years’ travels all over the country give me the possibility of showing the remarkable development of rural industries, and the advantages which were taken from them for recent developments in agriculture and horticulture. Besides, the publication of the statistical results of the French industrial census of 1896 permits me to give now, for France, most remarkable numerical data, showing the real relative importance of the great and the small industries.

And finally, the recent publication of the results of the third industrial census made in Germany in 1907 gives me the data for showing how the German small industries have been keeping their ground for the last twenty-five years—a subject which I could touch only in a general way in the first editions. The results of this census, compared with the two preceding ones, as also some of the conclusions arrived at by competent German writers, are indicated in the Appendix. So also the results recently arrived at in Switzerland concerning its home industries.

As to the need, generally felt at this moment, of an education which would combine a wide scientific instruction with a sound knowledge of manual work—a question which I treat in the last chapter—it can be said that this cause has already been won in this country during the last twenty years. The principle is generally recognised by this time, although most nations, impoverished as they are by their armaments, are much too slow in applying the principle in life.

P. Kropotkin.

Brighton, October, 1912.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.

Under the name of profits, rent, interest upon capital, surplus value, and the like, economists have eagerly discussed the benefits which the owners of land or capital, or some privileged nations, can derive, either from the underpaid work of the wage-labourer, or from the inferior position of one class of the community towards another class, or from the inferior economical development of one nation towards another nation. These profits being shared in a very unequal proportion between the different individuals, classes and nations engaged in production, considerable pains were taken to study the present apportionment of the benefits, and its economical and moral consequences, as well as the changes in the present economical organisation of society which might bring about a more equitable distribution of a rapidly accumulating wealth. It is upon questions relating to the right to that increment of wealth that the hottest battles are now fought between economists of different schools.

In the meantime the great question—“What have we to produce, and how?” necessarily remained in the background. Political economy, as it gradually emerges from its semi-scientific stage, tends more and more to become a science devoted to the study of the needs of men and of the means of satisfying them with the least possible waste of energy,—that is, a sort of physiology of society. But few economists, as yet, have recognised that this is the proper domain of economics, and have attempted to treat their science from this point of view. The main subject of social economy—that is, the economy of energy required for the satisfaction of human needs—is consequently the last subject which one expects to find treated in a concrete form in economical treatises.

The following pages are a contribution to a portion of this vast subject. They contain a discussion of the advantages which civilised societies could derive from a combination of industrial pursuits with intensive agriculture, and of brain work with manual work.

The importance of such a combination has not escaped the attention of a number of students of social science. It was eagerly discussed some fifty years ago under the names of “harmonised labour,” “integral education,” and so on. It was pointed out at that time that the greatest sum total of well-being can be obtained when a variety of agricultural, industrial and intellectual pursuits are combined in each community; and that man shows his best when he is in a position to apply his usually-varied capacities to several pursuits in the farm, the workshop, the factory, the study or the studio, instead of being riveted for life to one of these pursuits only.

At a much more recent date, in the ’seventies, Herbert Spencer’s theory of evolution gave origin in Russia to a remarkable work, The Theory of Progress, by M. M. Mikhailovsky. The part which belongs in progressive evolution to differentiation, and the part which belongs in it to an integration of aptitudes and activities, were discussed by the Russian author with depth of thought, and Spencer’s differentiation-formula was accordingly completed.

And, finally, out of a number of smaller monographs, I must mention a suggestive little book by J. R. Dodge, the United States statistician (Farm and Factory: Aids derived by Agriculture from Industries, New York, 1886). The same question was discussed in it from a practical American point of view.

Half a century ago a harmonious union between agricultural and industrial pursuits, as also between brain work and manual work, could only be a remote desideratum. The conditions under which the factory system asserted itself, as well as the obsolete forms of agriculture which prevailed at that time, prevented such a union from being feasible. Synthetic production was impossible. However, the wonderful simplification of the technical processes in both industry and agriculture, partly due to an ever-increasing division of labour—in analogy with what we see in biology—has rendered the synthesis possible; and a distinct tendency towards a synthesis of human activities becomes now apparent in modern economical evolution. This tendency is analysed in the subsequent chapters—a special weight being laid upon the present possibilities of agriculture, which are illustrated by a number of examples borrowed from different countries, and upon the small industries to which a new impetus is being given by the new methods of transmission of motive power.

The substance of these essays was published in 1888-1890 in the Nineteenth Century, and of one of them in the Forum. However, the tendencies indicated therein have been confirmed during the last ten years by such a mass of evidence that a very considerable amount of new matter had to be introduced, while the chapters on agriculture and the small trades had to be written anew.

I take advantage of this opportunity to address my best thanks to the editors of the Nineteenth Century and the Forum for their kind permission of reproducing these essays in a new form, as also to those friends and correspondents who have aided me in collecting information about agriculture and the petty trades.

P. Kropotkin.

Bromley, Kent, 1898.

CONTENTS.

FIELDS, FACTORIES, AND
WORKSHOPS.

CHAPTER I.
THE DECENTRALISATION OF INDUSTRIES.

Division of labour and integration—The spread of industrial skill—Each nation its own producer of manufactured goods—The United Kingdom—France—Germany—Russia—“German competition.”

Who does not remember the remarkable chapter by which Adam Smith opens his inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations? Even those of our contemporary economists who seldom revert to the works of the father of political economy, and often forget the ideas which inspired them, know that chapter almost by heart, so often has it been copied and recopied since. It has become an article of faith; and the economical history of the century which has elapsed since Adam Smith wrote has been, so to speak, an actual commentary upon it.

“Division of labour” was its watchword. And the division and subdivision—the permanent subdivision—of functions has been pushed so far as to divide humanity into castes which are almost as firmly established as those of old India. We have, first, the broad division into producers and consumers: little-consuming producers on the one hand, little-producing consumers on the other hand. Then, amidst the former, a series of further subdivisions: the manual worker and the intellectual worker, sharply separated from one another to the detriment of both; the agricultural labourers and the workers in the manufacture; and, amidst the mass of the latter, numberless subdivisions again—so minute, indeed, that the modern ideal of a workman seems to be a man or a woman, or even a girl or a boy, without the knowledge of any handicraft, without any conception whatever of the industry he or she is employed in, who is only capable of making all day long and for a whole life the same infinitesimal part of something: who from the age of thirteen to that of sixty pushes the coal cart at a given spot of the mine or makes the spring of a penknife, or “the eighteenth part of a pin.” Mere servants to some machine of a given description; mere flesh-and-bone parts of some immense machinery; having no idea how and why the machinery performs its rhythmical movements.

Skilled artisanship is being swept away as a survival of a past condemned to disappear. The artist who formerly found æsthetic enjoyment in the work of his hands is substituted by the human slave of an iron slave. Nay, even the agricultural labourer, who formerly used to find a relief from the hardships of his life in the home of his ancestors—the future home of his children—in his love of the field and in a keen intercourse with nature, even he has been doomed to disappear for the sake of division of labour. He is an anachronism, we are told; he must be substituted, in a Bonanza farm, by an occasional servant hired for the summer, and discharged as the autumn comes: a tramp who will never again see the field he has harvested once in his life. “An affair of a few years,” the economists say, “to reform agriculture in accordance with the true principles of division of labour and modern industrial organisation.”

Dazzled with the results obtained by a century of marvellous inventions, especially in England, our economists and political men went still farther in their dreams of division of labour. They proclaimed the necessity of dividing the whole of humanity into national workshops having each of them its own speciality. We were taught, for instance, that Hungary and Russia are predestined by nature to grow corn in order to feed the manufacturing countries; that Britain had to provide the world-market with cottons, iron goods, and coal; Belgium with woollen cloth; and so on. Nay, within each nation, each region had to have its own speciality. So it has been for some time since; so it ought to remain. Fortunes have been made in this way, and will continue to be made in the same way. It being proclaimed that the wealth of nations is measured by the amount of profits made by the few, and that the largest profits are made by means of a specialisation of labour, the question was not conceived to exist as to whether human beings would always submit to such a specialisation; whether nations could be specialised like isolated workmen. The theory was good for to-day—why should we care for to-morrow? To-morrow might bring its own theory!

And so it did. The narrow conception of life which consisted in thinking that profits are the only leading motive of human society, and the stubborn view which supposes that what has existed yesterday would last for ever, proved in disaccordance with the tendencies of human life; and life took another direction. Nobody will deny the high pitch of production which may be attained by specialisation. But, precisely in proportion as the work required from the individual in modern production becomes simpler and easier to be learned, and, therefore, also more monotonous and wearisome—the requirements of the individual for varying his work, for exercising all his capacities, become more and more prominent. Humanity perceives that there is no advantage for the community in riveting a human being for all his life to a given spot, in a workshop or a mine; no gain in depriving him of such work as would bring him into free intercourse with nature, make of him a conscious part of the grand whole, a partner in the highest enjoyments of science and art, of free work and creation.

Nations, too, refuse to be specialised. Each nation is a compound aggregate of tastes and inclinations, of wants and resources, of capacities and inventive powers. The territory occupied by each nation is in its turn a most varied texture of soils and climates, of hills and valleys, of slopes leading to a still greater variety of territories and races. Variety is the distinctive feature, both of the territory and its inhabitants; and that variety implies a variety of occupations. Agriculture calls manufactures into existence, and manufactures support agriculture. Both are inseparable; and the combination, the integration of both brings about the grandest results. In proportion as technical knowledge becomes everybody’s virtual domain, in proportion as it becomes international, and can be concealed no longer, each nation acquires the possibility of applying the whole variety of her energies to the whole variety of industrial and agricultural pursuits. Knowledge ignores artificial political boundaries. So also do the industries; and the present tendency of humanity is to have the greatest possible variety of industries gathered in each country, in each separate region, side by side with agriculture. The needs of human agglomerations correspond thus to the needs of the individual; and while a temporary division of functions remains the surest guarantee of success in each separate undertaking, the permanent division is doomed to disappear, and to be substituted by a variety of pursuits—intellectual, industrial, and agricultural—corresponding to the different capacities of the individual, as well as to the variety of capacities within every human aggregate.

When we thus revert from the scholastics of our text-books, and examine human life as a whole, we soon discover that, while all the benefits of a temporary division of labour must be maintained, it is high time to claim those of the integration of labour. Political economy has hitherto insisted chiefly upon division. We proclaim integration; and we maintain that the ideal of society—that is, the state towards which society is already marching—is a society of integrated, combined labour. A society where each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work; where each able-bodied human being is a worker, and where each worker works both in the field and the industrial workshop; where every aggregation of individuals, large enough to dispose of a certain variety of natural resources—it may be a nation, or rather a region—produces and itself consumes most of its own agricultural and manufactured produce.

Of course, as long as society remains organised so as to permit the owners of the land and capital to appropriate for themselves, under the protection of the State and historical rights, the yearly surplus of human production, no such change can be thoroughly accomplished. But the present industrial system, based upon a permanent specialisation of functions, already bears in itself the germs of its proper ruin. The industrial crises, which grow more acute and protracted, and are rendered still worse and still more acute by the armaments and wars implied by the present system, are rendering its maintenance more and more difficult. Moreover, the workers plainly manifest their intention to support no longer patiently the misery occasioned by each crisis. And each crisis accelerates the day when the present institutions of individual property and production will be shaken to their foundations with such internal struggles as will depend upon the more or less good sense of the now privileged classes.

But we maintain also that any socialist attempt at remodelling the present relations between Capital and Labour will be a failure, if it does not take into account the above tendencies towards integration. These tendencies have not yet received, in our opinion, due attention from the different socialist schools—but they must. A reorganised society will have to abandon the fallacy of nations specialised for the production of either agricultural or manufactured produce. It will have to rely on itself for the production of food and many, if not most, of the raw materials; it must find the best means of combining agriculture with manufacture—the work in the field with a decentralised industry; and it will have to provide for “integrated education,” which education alone, by teaching both science and handicraft from earliest childhood, can give to society the men and women it really needs.

Each nation—her own agriculturist and manufacturer; each individual working in the field and in some industrial art; each individual combining scientific knowledge with the knowledge of a handicraft—such is, we affirm, the present tendency of civilised nations.

The prodigious growth of industries in Great Britain, and the simultaneous development of the international traffic which now permits the transport of raw materials and articles of food on a gigantic scale, have created the impression that a few nations of West Europe were destined to become the manufacturers of the world. They need only—it was argued—to supply the market with manufactured goods, and they will draw from all over the surface of the earth the food they cannot grow themselves, as well as the raw materials they need for their manufactures. The steadily increasing speed of trans-oceanic communications and the steadily increasing facilities of shipping have contributed to enforce the above impression. If we take the enthusiastic pictures of international traffic, drawn in such a masterly way by Neumann Spallart—the statistician and almost the poet of the world-trade—we are inclined indeed to fall into ecstasy before the results achieved. “Why shall we grow corn, rear oxen and sheep, and cultivate orchards, go through the painful work of the labourer and the farmer, and anxiously watch the sky in fear of a bad crop, when we can get, with much less pain, mountains of corn from India, America, Hungary, or Russia, meat from New Zealand, vegetables from the Azores, apples from Canada, grapes from Malaga, and so on?” exclaim the West Europeans. “Already now,” they say, “our food consists, even in modest households, of produce gathered from all over the globe. Our cloth is made out of fibres grown and wool sheared in all parts of the world. The prairies of America and Australia; the mountains and steppes of Asia; the frozen wildernesses of the Arctic regions; the deserts of Africa and the depths of the oceans; the tropics and the lands of the midnight sun are our tributaries. All races of men contribute their share in supplying us with our staple food and luxuries, with plain clothing and fancy dress, while we are sending them in exchange the produce of our higher intelligence, our technical knowledge, our powerful industrial and commercial organising capacities! Is it not a grand sight, this busy and intricate exchange of produce all over the earth which has suddenly grown up within a few years?”

Grand it may be, but is it not a mere nightmare? Is it necessary? At what cost has it been obtained, and how long will it last?

Let us turn a hundred years back. France lay bleeding at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Her young industry, which had begun to grow by the end of the 18th century, was crushed down. Germany, Italy were powerless in the industrial field. The armies of the great Republic had struck a mortal blow to serfdom on the Continent; but with the return of reaction efforts were made to revive the decaying institution, and serfdom meant no industry worth speaking of. The terrible wars between France and England, which wars are often explained by merely political causes, had a much deeper meaning—an economical meaning. They were wars for the supremacy on the world market, wars against French industry and commerce, supported by a strong navy which France had begun to build—and Britain won the battle. She became supreme on the seas. Bordeaux was no more a rival to London; as to the French industries, they seemed to be killed in the bud. And, aided by the powerful impulse given to natural sciences and technology by a great era of inventions, finding no serious competitors in Europe, Britain began to develop her manufactures. To produce on a large scale in immense quantities became the watchword. The necessary human forces were at hand in the peasantry, partly driven by force from the land, partly attracted to the cities by high wages. The necessary machinery was created, and the British production of manufactured goods went on at a gigantic pace. In the course of less than seventy years—from 1810 to 1878—the output of coal grew from 10 to 133,000,000 tons; the imports of raw materials rose from 30 to 380,000,000 tons; and the exports of manufactured goods from 46 to 200,000,000 pounds. The tonnage of the commercial fleet was nearly trebled. Fifteen thousand miles of railways were built.

It is useless to repeat now at what a cost the above results were achieved. The terrible revelations of the parliamentary commissions of 1840-1842 as to the atrocious condition of the manufacturing classes, the tales of “cleared estates,” and kidnapped children are still fresh in the memory. They will remain standing monuments for showing by what means the great industry was implanted in this country. But the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the privileged classes was going on at a speed never dreamed of before. The incredible riches which now astonish the foreigner in the private houses of England were accumulated during that period; the exceedingly expensive standard of life which makes a person considered rich on the Continent appear as only of modest means in Britain was introduced during that time. The taxed property alone doubled during the last thirty years of the above period, while during the same years (1810 to 1878) no less than £1,112,000,000—nearly £2,000,000,000 by this time—was invested by English capitalists either in foreign industries or in foreign loans.[1]

But the monopoly of industrial production could not remain with England for ever. Neither industrial knowledge nor enterprise could be kept for ever as a privilege of these islands. Necessarily, fatally, they began to cross the Channel and spread over the Continent. The Great Revolution had created in France a numerous class of peasant proprietors, who enjoyed nearly half a century of a comparative well-being, or, at least, of a guaranteed labour. The ranks of homeless town workers increased slowly. But the middle-class revolution of 1789-1793 had already made a distinction between the peasant householders and the village prolétaires, and, by favouring the former to the detriment of the latter, it compelled the labourers who had no household nor land to abandon their villages, and thus to form the first nucleus of working classes given up to the mercy of manufacturers. Moreover, the peasant-proprietors themselves, after having enjoyed a period of undeniable prosperity, began in their turn to feel the pressure of bad times, and their children were compelled to look for employment in manufactures. Wars and revolution had checked the growth of industry; but it began to grow again during the second half of our century; it developed, it improved; and now, notwithstanding the loss of Alsace, France is no longer the tributary to England for manufactured produce which she was sixty years ago. To-day her exports of manufactured goods are valued at nearly one-half of those of Great Britain, and two-thirds of them are textiles; while her imports of the same consist chiefly of the finer sorts of cotton and woollen yarn—partly re-exported as stuffs—and a small quantity of woollen goods. For her own consumption France shows a decided tendency towards becoming entirely a self-supporting country, and for the sale of her manufactured goods she is tending to rely, not on her colonies, but especially on her own wealthy home market.[2]

Germany follows the same lines. During the last fifty years, and especially since the last war, her industry has undergone a thorough re-organisation. Her population having rapidly increased from forty to sixty millions, this increment went entirely to increase the urban population—without taking hands from agriculture—and in the cities it went to increase the population engaged in industry. Her industrial machinery has been thoroughly improved, and her new-born manufactures are supplied now with a machinery which mostly represents the last word of technical progress. She has plenty of workmen and technologists endowed with a superior technical and scientific education; and in an army of learned chemists, physicists and engineers her industry has a most powerful and intelligent aid, both for directly improving it and for spreading in the country serious scientific and technical knowledge. As a whole, Germany offers now the spectacle of a nation in a period of Aufschwung, of a sudden development, with all the forces of a new start in every domain of life. Fifty years ago she was a customer to England. Now she is already a competitor in the European and Asiatic markets, and at the present speedy rate of growth of her industries, her competition will soon be felt even more acutely than it is already felt.

At the same time the wave of industrial production, after having had its origin in the north-west of Europe, spreads towards the east and south-east, always covering a wider circle. And, in proportion as it advances east, and penetrates into younger countries, it implants there all the improvements due to a century of mechanical and chemical inventions; it borrows from science all the help that science can give to industry; and it finds populations eager to grasp the last results of modern knowledge. The new manufactures of Germany begin where Manchester arrived after a century of experiments and gropings; and Russia begins where Manchester and Saxony have now reached. Russia, in her turn, tries to emancipate herself from her dependency upon Western Europe, and rapidly begins to manufacture all those goods she formerly used to import, either from Britain or from Germany.

Protective duties may, perhaps, sometimes help the birth of new industries: always at the expense of some other growing industries, and always checking the improvement of those which already exist; but the decentralisation of manufactures goes on with or without protective duties—I should even say, notwithstanding the protective duties. Austria, Hungary and Italy follow the same lines—they develop their home industries—and even Spain and Servia are going to join the family of manufacturing nations. Nay, even India, even Brazil and Mexico, supported by English, French, and German capital and knowledge, begin to start home industries on their respective soils. Finally, a terrible competitor to all European manufacturing countries has grown up of late in the United States. In proportion as technical education spreads more and more widely, manufactures grow in the States; and they do grow at such a speed—an American speed—that in a very few years the now neutral markets will be invaded by American goods.

The monopoly of the first comers on the industrial field has ceased to exist. And it will exist no more, whatever may be the spasmodic efforts made to return to a state of things already belonging to the domain of history. New ways, new issues must be looked for: the past has lived, and it will live no more.

Before going farther, let me illustrate the march of industries towards the east by a few figures. And, to begin with, let me take the example of Russia. Not because I know it better, but because Russia is one of the latest comers on the industrial field. Fifty years ago she was considered as the ideal of an agricultural nation, doomed by nature itself to supply other nations with food, and to draw her manufactured goods from the west. So it was, indeed—but it is so no more.

In 1861—the year of the emancipation of the serfs—Russia and Poland had only 14,060 manufactories, which produced every year the value of 296,000,000 roubles (about £36,000,000). Twenty years later the number of establishments rose to 35,160, and their yearly production became nearly four times the above, i.e., 1,305,000,000 roubles (about £131,000,000); and in 1894, although the census left the smaller manufactures and all the industries which pay excise duties (sugar, spirits, matches) out of account, the aggregate production in the Empire reached already 1,759,000,000 roubles, i.e., £180,000,000. The most noteworthy feature of this increase is, that while the number of workmen employed in the manufactures has not even doubled since 1861 (it attained 1,555,000 in 1894, and 1,902,750 in 1910), the production per workman has more than trebled in the leading industries. The average was less than £70 per annum in 1861; it reaches now £219. The increase of production is thus chiefly due to the improvement of machinery.[3]

If we take, however, separate branches, and especially the textile industries and the machinery works, the progress appears still more striking. Thus, if we consider the eighteen years which preceded 1879 (when the import duties were increased by nearly 30 per cent. and a protective policy was definitely adopted), we find that even without protective duties the bulk of production in cottons increased three times, while the number of workers employed in that industry rose by only 25 per cent. The yearly production of each worker had thus grown from £45 to £117. During the next nine years (1880-1889) the yearly returns were more than doubled, attaining the respectable figure of £49,000,000 in money and 3,200,000 cwts. in bulk. Since that time, from 1890 to 1900, it has doubled once more, the quantity of raw cotton worked in the Russian factories having increased from 255,000 to 520,700 cwts., and the number of spindles having grown from 3,457,000 to 6,646,000 in 1900, and to 8,306,000 in 1910. It must also be remarked that, with a population of 165,000,000 inhabitants, the home market for Russian cottons is almost unlimited; while some cottons are also exported to Persia and Central Asia.[4]

True, that the finest sorts of yarn, as well as sewing cotton, have still to be imported. But Lancashire manufacturers will soon see to that; they now plant their mills in Russia. Two large mills for spinning the finest sorts of cotton yarn were opened in Russia in 1897, with the aid of English capital and English engineers, and a factory for making thin wire for cotton-carding has lately been opened at Moscow by a well-known Manchester manufacturer. Several more have followed since. Capital is international and, protection or no protection, it crosses the frontiers.

The same is true of woollens. In this branch Russia was for a certain time relatively backward. However, wool-combing, spinning and weaving mills, provided with the best modern plant, were built every year in Russia and Poland by English, German and Belgian mill-owners; so that now four-fifths of the ordinary wool, and as much of the finer sorts obtainable in Russia, are combed and spun at home—one fifth part only of each being sent abroad. The times when Russia was known as an exporter of raw wool are thus irretrievably gone.[5]

In machinery works no comparison can even be made between nowadays and 1861, or even 1870. Thanks to English and French engineers to begin with, and afterwards to technical progress within the country itself, Russia needs no longer to import any part of her railway plant. And as to agricultural machinery, we know, from several British Consular reports, that Russian reapers and ploughs successfully compete with the same implements of both American and English make. During the years 1880 to 1890, this branch of manufactures has largely developed in the Southern Urals (as a village industry, brought into existence by the Krasnoufimsk Technical School of the local District Council, or zemstvo), and especially on the plains sloping towards the Sea of Azov. About this last region Vice-Consul Green reported, in 1894, as follows: “Besides some eight or ten factories of importance,” he wrote, “the whole of the consular district is now studded with small engineering works, engaged chiefly in the manufacture of agricultural machines and implements, most of them having their own foundries.... The town of Berdyansk,” he added, “can now boast of the largest reaper manufactory in Europe, capable of turning out three thousand machines annually.”[6]

Let me add that the above-mentioned figures, including only those manufactures which show a yearly return of more than £200, do not include the immense variety of domestic trades which also have considerably grown of late, side by side with the manufactures. The domestic industries—so characteristic of Russia, and so necessary under her climate—occupy now more than 7,500,000 peasants, and their aggregate production was estimated a few years ago at more than the aggregate production of all the manufactures. It exceeded £180,000,000 per annum. I shall have an occasion to return later on to this subject, so that I shall be sober of figures, and merely say that even in the chief manufacturing provinces of Russia round about Moscow domestic weaving—for the trade—shows a yearly return of £4,500,000; and that even in Northern Caucasia, where the petty trades are of a recent origin, there are, in the peasants’ houses, 45,000 looms showing a yearly production of £200,000.

As to the mining industries, notwithstanding over-protection, and notwithstanding the competition of fuelwood and naphtha,[7] the output of the coal mines of Russia has doubled during the years 1896-1904, and in Poland it has increased fourfold.[8] Nearly all steel, three-quarters of the iron, and two-thirds of the pig-iron used in Russia are home produce, and the eight Russian works for the manufacture of steel rails are strong enough to throw on the market over 10,000,000 cwts. of rails every year (10,068,000 cwts. in 1910).[9]

It is no wonder, therefore, that the imports of manufactured goods into Russia are so insignificant, and that since 1870—that is, nine years before the general increase of duties—the proportion of manufactured goods to the aggregate imports has been on a steady decrease. Manufactured goods make now only one-fifth of the imports, and only occasionally rise to one-third, as was the case in 1910—a year of maximal imports. Besides, while the imports of Britain into Russia were valued at £16,300,000 in 1872, they were only £6,884,500 to £11,320,000 in the years 1894 to 1909. Out of them, manufactured goods were valued at a little more than £2,000,000—the remainder being either articles of food or raw and half-manufactured goods (metals, yarn and so on). They reached £15,300,000 in 1910—a year of maximum, and consisted chiefly of machinery and coal. In fact, the imports of British home produce have declined in the course of ten years from £8,800,000 to £5,000,000, so as to reduce in 1910 the value of British manufactured goods imported into Russia to the following trifling items: machinery, £1,320,000; cottons and cotton yarn, £360,000; woollens and woollen yarn, £480,000; chemical produce, £476,000; and so on. But the depreciation of British goods imported into Russia is still more striking. Thus, in 1876 Russia imported 8,000,000 cwts. of British metals, and they were paid £6,000,000; but in 1884, although the same quantity was imported, the amount paid was only £3,400,000. And the same depreciation is seen for all imported goods, although not always in the same proportion.

It would be a gross error to imagine that the decline of foreign imports is mainly due to high protective duties. The decline of imports is much better explained by the growth of home industries. The protective duties have no doubt contributed (together with other causes) towards attracting German and English manufacturers to Poland and Russia. Lodz—the Manchester of Poland—is quite a German city, and the Russian trade directories are full of English and German names. English and German capitalists, English engineers and foremen, have planted within Russia the improved cotton manufactures of their mother countries; they are busy now in improving the woollen industries and the production of machinery; while Belgians have rapidly created a great iron industry in South Russia. There is now not the slightest doubt—and this opinion is shared, not only by economists, but also by several Russian manufacturers—that a free-trade policy would not check the further growth of industries in Russia. It would only reduce the high profits of those manufacturers who do not improve their factories and chiefly rely upon cheap labour and long hours.

Moreover, as soon as Russia succeeds in obtaining more freedom, a further growth of her industries will immediately follow. Technical education—which, strange to say, was for a long time systematically suppressed by the Government—would rapidly grow and spread; and in a few years, with her natural resources and her laborious youth, which even now tries to combine workmanship with science, Russia would see her industrial powers increase tenfold. She farà da sè in the industrial field. She will manufacture all she needs; and yet she will remain an agricultural nation.

At the present time only a little more than 1,500,000 men and women, out of the 112,000,000 strong population of European Russia, work in manufactures, and 7,500,000 combine agriculture with manufacturing. This figure may treble without Russia ceasing to be an agricultural nation; but if it be trebled, there will be no room for imported manufactured goods, because an agricultural country can produce them cheaper than those countries which live on imported food. Let us not forget that in the United Kingdom 1,087,200 persons, all taken, are employed in all the textile industries of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and that only 300,000 out of them are males above eighteen years of age (311,000 in 1907); that these workpeople keep going 53,000,000 spindles and more than 700,000 looms in the cotton factories only; and that the yearly production of textiles during the last few years was so formidable that it represented a value of £200,000,000, and that the average value of textiles exported every year attained £136,257,500 in 1905-1910—to say nothing of the £163,400,000 reached in the extraordinary year of 1911.[10]

The same is still more true with regard to other European nations, much more advanced in their industrial development, and especially with regard to Germany. So much has been written about the competition which Germany offers to British trade, even in the British markets, and so much can be learned about it from a mere inspection of the London shops, that I need not enter into lengthy details. Several articles in reviews; the correspondence exchanged on the subject in The Daily Telegraph in August, 1886; numerous consular reports, regularly summed up in the leading newspapers, and still more impressive when consulted in originals; and, finally, political speeches, have familiarised the public opinion of this country with the importance and the powers of German competition.[11] Moreover, the forces which German industry borrows from the technical training of her workmen, engineers and numerous scientific men, have been so often discussed by the promoters of technical education in England that the sudden growth of Germany as an industrial power can be denied no more.

Where half a century was required in olden times to develop an industry, a few years are sufficient now. In the year 1864 only 160,000 cwts. of raw cotton were imported into Germany, and only 16,000 cwts. of cotton goods were exported; cotton spinning and weaving were mostly insignificant home industries. Twenty years later the imports of raw cotton were already 3,600,000 cwts., and in another twenty years they rose to 7,400,000 cwts.; while the exports of cottons and yarn, which were valued at £3,600,000 in 1883, and £7,662,000 in 1893, attained £19,000,000 in 1905. A great industry was thus created in less than thirty years, and has been growing since. The necessary technical skill was developed, and at the present time Germany remains tributary to Lancashire for the finest sorts of yarn only. However, it is very probable that even this disadvantage will soon be equalised.[12] Very fine spinning mills have lately been erected, and the emancipation from Liverpool, by means of a cotton exchange established at Bremen, is in fair progress.[13]

In the woollen trade we see the same rapid increase, and in 1910 the value of the exports of woollen goods attained £13,152,500 (against £8,220,300 in 1894), out of which £1,799,000 worth were sent on the average to the United Kingdom during the years 1906-1910.[14] The flax industry has grown at a still speedier rate, and as regards silks Germany is second only to France.

The progress realised in the German chemical trade is well known, and it is only too badly felt in Scotland and Northumberland; while the reports on the German iron and steel industries which one finds in the publications of the Iron and Steel Institute and in the inquiry which was made by the British Iron Trade Association show how formidably the production of pig-iron and of finished iron has grown in Germany since 1871. (See [Appendix D].) No wonder that the imports of iron and steel into Germany were reduced by one-half during the twenty years, 1874-1894, while the exports grew nearly four times. As to the machinery works, if the Germans have committed the error of too slavishly copying English patterns, instead of taking a new departure, and of creating new patterns, as the Americans did, we must still recognise that their copies are good and that they very successfully compete in cheapness with the tools and machinery produced in this country. (See [Appendix E].) I hardly need mention the superior make of German scientific apparatus. It is well known to scientific men, even in France.

In consequence of the above, the imports of manufactured goods into Germany are, as a rule, in decline. The aggregate imports of textiles (inclusive of yarn) stand so low as to be compensated by nearly equal values of exports. And there is no doubt that not only the German markets for textiles will be soon lost for other manufacturing countries, but that German competition will be felt stronger and stronger both in the neutral markets and those of Western Europe. One can easily win applause from uninformed auditories by exclaiming with more or less pathos that German produce can never equal the English! The fact is, that it competes in cheapness, and sometimes also—where it is needed—in an equally good workmanship; and this circumstance is due to many causes.

The “cheap labour” cause, so often alluded to in discussions about “German competition,” which take place in this country and in France, must be dismissed by this time, since it has been well proved by so many recent investigations that low wages and long hours do not necessarily mean cheap produce. Cheap labour and protection simply mean the possibility for a number of employers to continue working with obsolete and bad machinery; but in highly developed staple industries, such as the cotton and the iron industries, the cheapest produce is obtained with high wages, short hours and the best machinery. When the number of operatives which is required for each 1000 spindles can vary from seventeen (in many Russian factories) to three (in England), and when one weaver can look either after twenty Northrop machine-looms, as we see it in the United States, or after two machine-looms only, as it is the case in backward mills, then it is evident that no reduction of wages can compensate for that immense difference. Consequently, in the best German cotton mills and ironworks the wages of the worker (we know it directly for the ironworks from the above-mentioned inquiry of the British Iron Trade Association) are not lower than they are in Great Britain. All that can be said is, that the worker in Germany gets more for his wages than he gets in this country—the paradise of the middleman—a paradise which it will remain so long as it lives chiefly on imported food produce.

The chief reason for the successes of Germany in the industrial field is the same as it is for the United States. Both countries have only lately entered the industrial phase of their development, and they have entered it with all the energy of youth. Both countries enjoy a widely-spread scientifically-technical—or, at least, concrete scientific—education. In both countries manufactories are built according to the newest and best models which have been worked out elsewhere; and both countries are in a period of awakening in all branches of activity—literature and science, industry and commerce. They enter now on the same phase in which Great Britain was in the first half of the nineteenth century, when British workers took such a large part in the invention of the wonderful modern machinery.

We have simply before us a fact of the consecutive development of nations. And instead of decrying or opposing it, it would be much better to see whether the two pioneers of the great industry—Britain and France—cannot take a new initiative and do something new again; whether an issue for the creative genius of these two nations must not be sought for in a new direction—namely, the utilisation of both the land and the industrial powers of man for securing well-being to the whole nation instead of to the few.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See [Appendix A].

[2] See [Appendix B].

[3] For the last few years, since the Japanese war, the figures were uncertain. It appeared, however, in 1910, that there were in the empire, including the industries paying an excise duty, 19,983 establishments, employing 2,253,790 persons, and showing a yearly production of 4,565,400,000 roubles (£494,600,000). Out of them, the industrial establishments under the factory inspectors in European Russia proper, Poland, and the four northern provinces of Caucasia numbered 15,720, employing 1,951,955 workpeople, out of whom 1,227,360 were men, 521,236 women, and 203,359 children.

[4] The yearly imports of raw cotton from Central Asia and Transcaucasia represent, as a rule, about one-tenth part of the total imports of raw cotton (£1,086,000, as against £11,923,000 in 1910). They are quite a recent growth, the first plantations of the American cotton tree having been introduced in Turkestan by the Russians, as well as the first sorting and pressing establishments. The relative cheapness of the plain cottons in Russia, and the good qualities of the printed cottons, attracted the attention of the British Commissioner at the Nijni Novgorod Exhibition in 1897, and are spoken of at some length in his report.

[5] The yearly production of the 1,037 woollen mills of Russia and Poland (149,850 workpeople) was valued at about £25,000,000 in 1910, as against £12,000,000 in 1894.

[6] Report of Vice-Consul Green, The Economist, 9th June, 1894: “Reapers of a special type, sold at £15 to £17, are durable and go through more work than either the English or the American reapers.” In the year 1893, 20,000 reaping machines, 50,000 ploughs, and so on, were sold in that district only, representing a value of £822,000. Were it not for the simply prohibitive duties imposed upon foreign pig-iron (two and a half times its price in the London market), this industry would have taken a still greater development. But in order to protect the home iron industry—which consequently continued to cling to obsolete forms in the Urals—a duty of 61s. a ton of imported pig-iron was levied. The consequences of this policy for Russian agriculture, railways and State’s budget have been discussed in full in a work by A. A. Radzig, The Iron Industry of the World. St. Petersburg, 1896 (Russian).

[7] Out of the 1,500 steamers which ply on Russian rivers one-quarter are heated with naphtha, and one-half with wood; wood is also the chief fuel of the railways and ironworks in the Urals.

[8] The output was, in 1910, 24,146,000 tons in European Russia, and 1,065,000 tons in Siberia.

[9] See [Appendix C].

[10] Here are the figures obtained by the official census of 1908. In all the cotton industry, only 220,563 men (including boys), 262,245 women, and 90,061 girls less than eighteen years old were employed. They produced 6,417,798,000 yards of unbleached gray, and 611,824,000 yards of bleached white and coloured cottons—that is, 160 yards per head of population—and 1,507,381,000 lb. of yarn, valued £96,000,000. We have thus 12,271 yards of cotton, and 2,631 lb. of yarn per person of workpeople employed. For woollens and worsted there were 112,438 men and boys, 111,492 women, and 34,087 girls under eighteen. The value (incomplete) of the woven goods was about £40,250,000, and that of the yarn about £21,000,000. These figures are most instructive, as they show how much man can produce with the present machinery. Unfortunately, the real productivity in a modern factory is not yet understood by the economists. Thus, we saw lately Russian economists very seriously maintaining that it was necessary to “proletarize” the peasants (about 100,000,000) in order to create a great industry. We see now that if one-fourth, or even one-fifth, part only of the yearly increase of the population took to industry (as it has done in Germany), Russian factories would soon produce such quantities of all sorts of manufactured goods, that they would be able to supply with them 400 or 500 million people, in addition to the population of the Russian Empire.

[11] Many facts in point have also been collected in a little book, Made in Germany, by E. E. Williams. Unhappily, the facts relative to the recent industrial development of Germany are so often used in a partisan spirit in order to promote protection that their real importance is often misunderstood.

[12] Francke, Die neueste Entwickelung der Textil-Industrie in Deutschland.

[13] Cf. Schulze Gäwernitz, Der Grossbetrieb, etc.—See [Appendixes D], [E], [F].

[14] The imports of German woollen stuffs into this country have steadily grown from £607,444 in 1890 to £907,569 in 1894, and £1,822,514 in 1910. The British exports to Germany (of woollen stuffs and yarns) have also grown, but not in the same proportion. They were valued at £2,769,392 in 1890, £3,017,163 in 1894, and £4,638,000 in 1906-1910 (a five years’ average).

CHAPTER II.
THE DECENTRALISATION OF INDUSTRIES—(continued).

Italy and Spain—India—Japan—The United States—The cotton, woollen, and silk trades—The growing necessity for each country to rely chiefly upon home consumers.

The flow of industrial growths spreads, however, not only east; it moves also south-east and south. Austria and Hungary are rapidly gaining ground in the race for industrial importance. The Triple Alliance has already been menaced by the growing tendency of Austrian manufacturers to protect themselves against German competition; and even the dual monarchy has seen its two sister nations quarrelling about customs duties. Austrian industries are a modern growth, and still they already give occupation to more than 4,000,000 workpeople.[15] Bohemia, in a few decades, has grown to be an industrial country of considerable importance; and the excellence and originality of the machinery used in the newly reformed flour-mills of Hungary show that the young industry of Hungary is on the right road, not only to become a competitor to her elder sisters, but also to add her share to our knowledge as to the use of the forces of nature. Let me add, by the way, that the same is true to some extent with regard to Finland. Figures are wanting as to the present state of the aggregate industries of Austria-Hungary; but the relatively low imports of manufactured goods are worthy of note. For British manufacturers Austria-Hungary is, in fact, no customer worth speaking of; but even with regard to Germany she is rapidly emancipating herself from her former dependence. (See [Appendix G].)

The same industrial progress extends over the southern peninsulas. Who would have spoken in 1859 about Italian manufactures? And yet—the Turin Exhibition of 1884 has shown it—Italy ranks already among the manufacturing countries. “You see everywhere a considerable industrial and commercial effort made,” wrote a French economist to the Temps. “Italy aspires to go on without foreign produce. The patriotic watchword is, Italy all by herself. It inspires the whole mass of producers. There is not a single manufacturer or tradesman who, even in the most trifling circumstances, does not do his best to emancipate himself from foreign guardianship.” The best French and English patterns are imitated and improved by a touch of national genius and artistic traditions. Complete statistics are wanting, so that the statistical Annuario resorts to indirect indications. But the rapid increase of imports of coal (9,339,000 tons in 1910, as against 779,000 tons in 1871); the growth of the mining industries, which have trebled their production during the fifteen years, 1870 to 1885; the increasing production of steel and machinery (£4,800,000 in 1900), which—to use Bovio’s words—shows how a country having no fuel nor minerals of her own can have nevertheless a notable metallurgical industry; and, finally, the growth of textile industries disclosed by the net imports of raw cottons and the number of spindles[16]—all these show that the tendency towards becoming a manufacturing country capable of satisfying her needs by her own manufactures is not a mere dream. As to the efforts made for taking a more lively part in the trade of the world, who does not know the traditional capacities of the Italians in that direction?

I ought also to mention Spain, whose textile mining and metallurgical industries are rapidly growing; but I hasten to go over to countries which a few years ago were considered as eternal and obligatory customers to the manufacturing nations of Western Europe. Let us take, for instance, Brazil. Was it not doomed by economists to grow cotton, to export it in a raw state, and to receive cotton goods in exchange? In 1870 its nine miserable cotton mills could boast only of an aggregate of 385 spindles. But already in 1887 there were in Brazil 46 cotton mills, and five of them had already 40,000 spindles; while altogether their nearly 10,000 looms threw every year on the Brazilian markets more than 33,000,000 yards of cotton stuffs.

Twenty five years later, in 1912, there were already 161 cotton mills, with 1,500,000 spindles and 50,000 looms, employing over 100,000 operatives.[17] Even Vera Cruz, in Mexico, under the protection of customs officers, has begun to manufacture cottons, and boasted in 1887 its 40,200 spindles, 287,700 pieces of cotton cloth, and 212,000 lb. of yarn. Since that year progress has been steady, and in 1894 Vice-Consul Chapman reported that some of the finest machines are to be found at the Orizaba spinning mills, while “cotton prints,” he wrote, “are now turned out as good if not superior to the imported article.”[18] In 1910, 32,000 workpeople were already employed in 145 cotton mills, which had 703,000 spindles, and 25,000 power-looms.[19]

The flattest contradiction to the export theory has, however, been given by India. She was always considered as the surest customer for British cottons, and so she has been until quite lately. Out of the total of cotton goods exported from Britain she used to buy more than one-quarter, very nearly one-third (from £17,000,000 to £22,000,000, out of an aggregate of about £75,000,000 in the years 1880-1890). But things have begun to change, and in 1904-1907 the exports were only from £21,680,000 to £25,680,000 out of an aggregate of £110,440,000. The Indian cotton manufactures, which—for some causes not fully explained—were so unsuccessful at their beginnings, suddenly took firm root.

In 1860 they consumed only 23,000,000 lb. of raw cotton, but the quantity was nearly four times as much in 1877, and it trebled again within the next ten years: 283,000,000 lb. of raw cotton were used in 1887-1888. The number of cotton mills grew up from 40 in 1887 to 147 in 1895; the number of spindles rose from 886,100 to 3,844,300 in the same years; and where 57,188 workers were employed in 1887, we found, seven years later, 146,240 operatives. And now, in 1909-1910, we find 237 cotton mills at work, with 6,136,000 spindles, 80,000 looms, and 231,850 workpeople. As for the quality of the mills, the blue-books praise them; the German chambers of commerce state that the best spinning mills in Bombay “do not now stand far behind the best German ones”; and two great authorities in the cotton industry, Mr. James Platt and Mr. Henry Lee, agree in saying “that in no other country of the earth except in Lancashire do the operatives possess such a natural leaning to the textile industry as in India.”[20]

The exports of cotton twist from India more than doubled in five years (1882-1887), and already in 1887 we could read in the Statement (p. 62) that “what cotton twist was imported was less and less of the coarser and even medium kind, which indicates that the Indian (spinning) mills are gradually gaining hold of the home markets.” Consequently, while India continued to import nearly the same amount of British cotton goods and yarn (from £16,000,000 to £25,700,000 in 1900-1908), she threw already in 1887 on the foreign markets no less than £3,635,510 worth of her own cottons of Lancashire patterns; she exported 33,000,000 yards of gray cotton piece goods manufactured in India by Indian workmen. And the export has continued to grow since, so that in the year 1910-1911 the value of the piece-goods and yarn exported from India reached the value of £7,943,700.

The jute factories in India have grown at a still speedier rate, and the once flourishing jute trade of Dundee was brought to decay, not only by the high tariffs of continental powers, but also by Indian competition.[21] Even woollen mills have lately been started; while the iron industry took a sudden development in India, since the means were found, after many experiments and failures, to work furnaces with local coal. In a few years, we are told by specialists, India will be self-supporting for iron. Nay, it is not without apprehension that the English manufacturers see that the imports of Indian manufactured textiles to this country are steadily growing, while in the markets of the Far East and Africa India becomes a serious competitor to the mother country.

Why should it not be so? What might prevent the growth of Indian manufactures? Is it the want of capital? But capital knows no fatherland; and if high profits can be derived from the work of Indian coolies whose wages are only one-half of those of English workmen, or even less, capital will migrate to India, as it has gone to Russia, although its migration may mean starvation for Lancashire and Dundee. Is it the want of knowledge? But longitudes and latitudes are no obstacle to its spreading; it is only the first steps that are difficult. As to the superiority of workmanship, nobody who knows the Hindoo worker will doubt about his capacities. Surely they are not below those of the 36,000 children less than fourteen years of age, or the 238,000 boys and girls less than eighteen years old, who are employed in the British textile manufactories.

Twenty years surely are not much in the life of nations. And yet within the last twenty years another powerful competitor has grown in the East. I mean Japan. In October, 1888, the Textile Recorder mentioned in a few lines that the annual production of yarns in the cotton mills of Japan had attained 9,498,500 lb., and that fifteen more mills, which would hold 156,100 spindles, were in course of erection.[22] Two years later, 27,000,000 lb. of yarn were spun in Japan; and while in 1887-1888 Japan imported five or six times as much yarn from abroad as was spun at home, next year two-thirds only of the total consumption of the country were imported from abroad.[23]

From that date the production grew up regularly. From 6,435,000 lb. in 1886 it reached 91,950,000 lb. in 1893, and 153,444,000 lb. in 1895. In nine years it had thus increased twenty-four times. Since then it rose to 413,800,000 lb. in 1909; and we learn from the Financial Economical Annual for the years 1910 and 1911, published at Tokio, that there were in Japan, in 1909, no less than 3,756 textile factories, with 1,785,700 spindles and 51,185 power-looms, to which 783,155 hand-looms must be added. Japan is thus already a serious competitor of the great industrial nations for tissues altogether, and especially for cottons, in the markets of Eastern Asia; and it took it only five-and-twenty years to attain this position. The total production of tissues, valued at £1,200,000 in the year 1887, rapidly rose to £14,270,000 in 1895 and to £22,500,000 in 1909—cottons entering into this amount to the extent of nearly two-fifths. Consequently, the imports of foreign cotton goods from Europe fell from £1,640,000 in 1884 to £849,600 in 1895, and to £411,600 in 1910, while the exports of silk goods rose to nearly £3,000,000.[24]

As to the coal and iron industries, I ventured in the first edition of this book to predict that the Japanese would not long remain a tributary to Europe for iron goods—that their ambition was also to have their own shipbuilding yards, and that the previous year 300 engineers left the Elswick works of Mr. Armstrong in order to start shipbuilding in Japan. They were engaged for five years only—the Japanese expecting to have learned enough in five years to be their own shipbuilders. This prediction has been entirely fulfilled. Japan has now 1,030 iron and machine works, and she now builds her own warships. During the last war, the progress realised in all industries connected with war was rendered fully evident.[25]

All this shows that the much-dreaded invasion of the East upon European markets is in rapid progress. The Chinese slumber still; but I am firmly persuaded from what I saw of China that the moment they will begin to manufacture with the aid of European machinery—and the first steps have already been made—they will do it with more success, and necessarily on a far greater scale, than even the Japanese.

But what about the United States, which cannot be accused of employing cheap labour or of sending to Europe “cheap and nasty” produce? Their great industry is of yesterday’s date; and yet the States already send to old Europe constantly increasing quantities of machinery. In 1890 they began even to export iron, which they obtain at a very low cost, owing to admirable new methods which they have introduced in metallurgy.

In the course of twenty years (1870-1890) the number of persons employed in the American manufactures was more than doubled, and the value of their produce was nearly trebled; and in the course of the next fifteen years, the number of persons employed increased again by nearly fifty per cent., while the value of the produce was nearly doubled.[26] The cotton industry, supplied with excellent home-made machinery, has been rapidly developing, so that the yearly production of textiles attained in 1905 a value of 2,147,441,400 dollars, thus being twice as large as the yearly production of the United Kingdom in the same branch (which was valued at about £200,000,000); and the exports of cottons of domestic manufacture attained in 1910 the respectable figure of £8,600,000.[27] As to the yearly output of pig-iron and steel, it is already in excess of the yearly output in Britain;[28] and the organisation of that industry is also superior, as Mr. Berkley pointed out, already in 1891, in his address to the Institute of Civil Engineers.[29]

But all this has grown almost entirely within the last thirty or forty years—whole industries having been created entirely since 1860.[30] What will, then, American industry be twenty years, hence, aided as it is by a wonderful development of technical skill, by excellent schools, a scientific education which goes hand in hand with technical education, and a spirit of enterprise which is unrivalled in Europe?

Volumes have been written about the crisis of 1886-1887, a crisis which, to use the words of the Parliamentary Commission, lasted since 1875, with but “a short period of prosperity enjoyed by certain branches of trade in the years 1880 to 1883,” and a crisis, I shall add, which extended over all the chief manufacturing countries of the world. All possible causes of the crisis have been examined; but, whatever the cacophony of conclusions arrived at, all unanimously agreed upon one, namely, that of the Parliamentary Commission, which could be summed up as follows: “The manufacturing countries do not find such customers as would enable them to realise high profits.” Profits being the basis of capitalist industry, low profits explain all ulterior consequences.

Low profits induce the employers to reduce the wages, or the number of workers, or the number of days of employment during the week, or eventually compel them to resort to the manufacture of lower kinds of goods, which, as a rule, are paid worse than the higher sorts. As Adam Smith said, low profits ultimately mean a reduction of wages, and low wages mean a reduced consumption by the worker. Low profits mean also a somewhat reduced consumption by the employer; and both together mean lower profits and reduced consumption with that immense class of middlemen which has grown up in manufacturing countries, and that, again, means a further reduction of profits for the employers.

A country which manufactures to a great extent for export, and therefore lives to a considerable amount on the profits derived from her foreign trade, stands very much in the same position as Switzerland, which lives to a great extent on the profits derived from the foreigners who visit her lakes and glaciers. A good “season” means an influx of from £1,000,000 to £2,000,000 of money imported by the tourists, and a bad “season” has the effects of a bad crop in an agricultural country: a general impoverishment follows. So it is also with a country which manufactures for export. If the “season” is bad, and the exported goods cannot be sold abroad for twice their value at home, the country which lives chiefly on these bargains suffers. Low profits for the innkeepers of the Alps mean narrowed circumstances in large parts of Switzerland; and low profits for the Lancashire and Scotch manufacturers, and the wholesale exporters, mean narrowed circumstances in Great Britain. The cause is the same in both cases.

For many decades past we had not seen such a cheapness of wheat and manufactured goods as we saw in 1883-1884, and yet in 1886 the country was suffering from a terrible crisis. People said, of course, that the cause of the crisis was over-production. But over-production is a word utterly devoid of sense if it does not mean that those who are in need of all kinds of produce have not the means for buying them with their low wages. Nobody would dare to affirm that there is too much furniture in the crippled cottages, too many bedsteads and bedclothes in the workmen’s dwellings, too many lamps burning in the huts, and too much cloth on the shoulders, not only of those who used to sleep (in 1886) in Trafalgar Square between two newspapers, but even in those households where a silk hat makes a part of the Sunday dress. And nobody will dare to affirm that there is too much food in the homes of those agricultural labourers who earn twelve shillings a week, or of those women who earn from fivepence to sixpence a day in the clothing trade and other small industries which swarm in the outskirts of all great cities. Over-production means merely and simply a want of purchasing powers amidst the workers. And the same want of purchasing powers of the workers was felt everywhere on the Continent during the years 1885-1887.

After the bad years were over, a sudden revival of international trade took place; and, as the British exports rose in four years (1886 to 1890) by nearly 24 per cent., it began to be said that there was no reason for being alarmed by foreign competition; that the decline of exports in 1885-1887 was only temporary, and general in Europe; and that England, now as of old, fully maintained her dominant position in the international trade. It is certainly true that if we consider exclusively the money value of the exports for the years 1876 to 1895, we see no permanent decline, we notice only fluctuations. British exports, like commerce altogether, seem to show a certain periodicity. They fell from £201,000,000 sterling in 1876 to £192,000,000 in 1879; then they rose again to £241,000,000 in 1882, and fell down to £213,000,000 in 1886; again they rose to £264,000,000 in 1890, but fell again, reaching a minimum of £216,000,000 in 1894, to be followed next year by a slight movement upwards.

This periodicity being a fact, Mr. Giffen could make light in 1886 of “German competition” by showing that exports from the United Kingdom had not decreased. It can even be said that, per head of population, they had remained unchanged until 1904, undergoing only the usual ups and downs.[31] However, when we come to consider the quantities exported, and compare them with the money values of the exports, even Mr. Giffen had to acknowledge that the prices of 1883 were so low in comparison with those of 1873 that in order to reach the same money value the United Kingdom would have had to export four pieces of cotton instead of three, and eight or ten tons of metallic goods instead of six. “The aggregate of British foreign trade, if valued at the prices of ten years previously, would have amounted to £861,000,000 instead of £667,000,000,” we were told by no less an authority than the Commission on Trade Depression.

It might, however, be said that 1873 was an exceptional year, owing to the inflated demand which took place after the Franco-German war. But the same downward movement continued for a number of years. Thus, if we take the figures given in the Statesman’s Year-book, we see that while the United Kingdom exported, in 1883, 4,957,000,000 yards of piece goods (cotton, woollen and linen) and 316,000,000 lb. of yarn in order to reach an export value of £104,000,000, the same country had to export, in 1895, no less than 5,478,000,000 yards of the same stuffs and 330,000,000 lb. of yarn in order to realise £99,700,000 only. And the figures would have appeared still more unfavourable if we took the cottons alone. True, the conditions improved during the last ten years, so that in 1906 the exports were similar to those of 1873; and they were better still in 1911, which was a year of an extraordinary foreign trade, when 7,041,000,000 yards of stuffs and 307,000,000 lb. of yarn were exported—the two being valued at £163,400,000. However, it was especially the yarn which kept the high prices, because it is the finest sorts of yarn which are now exported. But the great profits of the years 1873-1880 are irretrievably gone.

We thus see that while the total value of the exports from the United Kingdom, in proportion to its growing population, remains, broadly speaking, unaltered for the last thirty years, the high prices which could be got for the exports thirty years ago, and with them the high profits, are gone. And no amount of arithmetical calculations will persuade the British manufacturers that such is not the case. They know perfectly well that the home markets grow continually overstocked; that the best foreign markets are escaping; and that in the neutral markets Britain is being undersold. This is the unavoidable consequence of the development of manufactures all over the world. (See [Appendix J].)

Great hopes were laid, some time ago, in Australia as a market for British goods; but Australia will soon do what Canada already does. She will manufacture. And the colonial exhibitions, by showing to the “colonists” what they are able to do, and how they must do, are only accelerating the day when each colony farà da sè in her turn. Canada and India already impose protective duties on British goods. As to the much-spoken-of markets on the Congo, and Mr. Stanley’s calculations and promises of a trade amounting to £26,000,000 a year if the Lancashire people supply the Africans with loin-cloths, such promises belong to the same category of fancies as the famous nightcaps of the Chinese which were to enrich England after the first Chinese war. The Chinese prefer their own home-made nightcaps; and as to the Congo people, four countries at least are already competing for supplying them with their poor dress: Britain, Germany, the United States, and, last but not least, India.

There was a time when this country had almost the monopoly in the cotton industries; but already in 1880 she possessed only 55 per cent. of all the spindles at work in Europe, the United States and India (40,000,000 out of 72,000,000), and a little more than one-half of the looms (550,000 out of 972,000). In 1893 the proportion was further reduced to 49 per cent. of the spindles (45,300,000 out of 91,340,000), and now the United Kingdom has only 41 per cent. of all the spindles.[32] It was thus losing ground while the others were winning. And the fact is quite natural: it might have been foreseen. There is no reason why Britain should always be the great cotton manufactory of the world, when raw cotton has to be imported into this country as elsewhere. It was quite natural that France, Germany, Italy, Russia, India, Japan, the United States, and even Mexico and Brazil, should begin to spin their own yarns and to weave their own cotton stuffs. But the appearance of the cotton industry in a country, or, in fact, of any textile industry, unavoidably becomes the starting-point for the growth of a series of other industries; chemical and mechanical works, metallurgy and mining feel at once the impetus given by a new want. The whole of the home industries, as also technical education altogether, must improve in order to satisfy that want as soon as it has been felt.

What has happened with regard to cottons is going on also with regard to other industries. Great Britain, which stood in 1880 at the head of the list of countries producing pig-iron, came in 1904 the third in the same list, which was headed by the United States and Germany; while Russia, which occupied the seventh place in 1880, comes now fourth, after Great Britain.[33] Britain and Belgium have no longer the monopoly of the woollen trade. Immense factories at Verviers are silent; the Belgian weavers are misery-stricken, while Germany yearly increases her production of woollens, and exports nine times more woollens than Belgium. Austria has her own woollens and exports them; Riga, Lodz, and Moscow supply Russia with fine woollen cloths; and the growth of the woollen industry in each of the last-named countries calls into existence hundreds of connected trades.

For many years France has had the monopoly of the silk trade. Silkworms being reared in Southern France, it was quite natural that Lyons should grow into a centre for the manufacture of silks. Spinning, domestic weaving, and dyeing works developed to a great extent. But eventually the industry took such an extension that home supplies of raw silk became insufficient, and raw silk was imported from Italy, Spain and Southern Austria, Asia Minor, the Caucasus and Japan, to the amount of from £9,000,000 to £11,000,000 in 1875 and 1876, while France had only £800,000 worth of her own silk. Thousands of peasant boys and girls were attracted by high wages to Lyons and the neighbouring district; the industry was prosperous.

However, by-and-by new centres of silk trade grew up at Basel and in the peasant houses round Zürich. French emigrants imported the trade into Switzerland, and it developed there, especially after the civil war of 1871. Then the Caucasus Administration invited French workmen and women from Lyons and Marseilles to teach the Georgians and the Russians the best means of rearing the silkworm, as well as the whole of the silk trade; and Stavropol became a new centre for silk weaving. Austria and the United States did the same; and what are now the results?

During the years 1872 to 1881 Switzerland more than doubled the produce of her silk industry; Italy and Germany increased it by one-third; and the Lyons region, which formerly manufactured to the value of 454 million francs a year, showed in 1887 a return of only 378 millions. The exports of Lyons silks, which reached an average of 425,000,000 francs in 1855-1859, and 460,000,000 in 1870-1874, fell down to 233,000,000 in 1887. And it is reckoned by French specialists that at present no less than one-third of the silk stuffs used in France are imported from Zurich, Crefeld, and Barmen. Nay, even Italy, which has now 191,000 persons engaged in the industry, sends her silks to France and competes with Lyons.

The French manufacturers may cry as loudly as they like for protection, or resort to the production of cheaper goods of lower quality; they may sell 3,250,000 kilogrammes of silk stuffs at the same price as they sold 2,500,000 in 1855-1859—they will never again regain the position they occupied before. Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the United States and Russia have their own silk factories, and will import from Lyons only the highest qualities of stuffs. As to the lower sorts, a foulard has become a common attire with the St. Petersburg housemaids, because the North Caucasian domestic trades supply them at a price which would starve the Lyons weavers. The trade has been decentralised, and while Lyons is still a centre for the higher artistic silks, it will never be again the chief centre for the silk trade which it was thirty years ago.

Like examples could be produced by the score. Greenock no longer supplies Russia with sugar, because Russia has plenty of her own at the same price as it sells at in England. The watch trade is no more a speciality of Switzerland: watches are now made everywhere. India extracts from her ninety collieries two-thirds of her annual consumption of coal. The chemical trade which grew up on the banks of the Clyde and Tyne, owing to the special advantages offered for the import of Spanish pyrites and the agglomeration of such a variety of industries along the two estuaries, is now in decay. Spain, with the help of English capital, is beginning to utilise her own pyrites for herself; and Germany has become a great centre for the manufacture of sulphuric acid and soda—nay, she already complains about over-production.

But enough! I have before me so many figures, all telling the same tale, that examples could be multiplied at will. It is time to conclude, and, for every unprejudiced mind, the conclusion is self-evident. Industries of all kinds decentralise and are scattered all over the globe; and everywhere a variety, an integrated variety, of trades grows, instead of specialisation. Such are the prominent features of the times we live in. Each nation becomes in its turn a manufacturing nation; and the time is not far off when each nation of Europe, as well as the United States, and even the most backward nations of Asia and America, will themselves manufacture nearly everything they are in need of. Wars and several accidental causes may check for some time the scattering of industries: they will not stop it; it is unavoidable. For each new-comer the first steps only are difficult. But, as soon as any industry has taken firm root, it calls into existence hundreds of other trades; and as soon as the first steps have been made, and the first obstacles have been overcome, the industrial growth goes on at an accelerated rate.

The fact is so well felt, if not understood, that the race for colonies has become the distinctive feature of the last twenty years. Each nation will have her own colonies. But colonies will not help. There is not a second India in the world, and the old conditions will be repeated no more. Nay, some of the British colonies already threaten to become serious competitors with their mother country; others, like Australia, will not fail to follow the same lines. As to the yet neutral markets, China will never be a serious customer to Europe: she can produce much cheaper at home; and when she begins to feel a need for goods of European patterns, she will produce them herself. Woe to Europe, if on the day that the steam engine invades China she is still relying on foreign customers! As to the African half-savages, their misery is no foundation for the well-being of a civilised nation.

Progress must be looked for in another direction. It is in producing for home use. The customers for the Lancashire cottons and the Sheffield cutlery, the Lyons silks and the Hungarian flour-mills, are not in India, nor in Africa. The true consumers of the produce of our factories must be our own populations. And they can be that, once we organise our economical life so that they might issue from their present destitution. No use to send floating shops to New Guinea with British or German millinery, when there are plenty of would-be customers for British millinery in these very islands, and for German goods in Germany. Instead of worrying our brains by schemes for getting customers abroad, it would be better to try to answer the following questions: Why the British worker, whose industrial capacities are so highly praised in political speeches; why the Scotch crofter and the Irish peasant, whose obstinate labours in creating new productive soil out of peat bogs are occasionally so much spoken of, are no customers to the Lancashire weavers, the Sheffield cutlers and the Northumbrian and Welsh pitmen? Why the Lyons weavers not only do not wear silks, but sometimes have no food in their attics? Why the Russian peasants sell their corn, and for four, six, and sometimes eight months every year are compelled to mix bark and auroch grass to a handful of flour for baking their bread? Why famines are so common amidst the growers of wheat and rice in India?

Under the present conditions of division into capitalists and labourers, into property-holders and masses living on uncertain wages, the spreading of industries over new fields is accompanied by the very same horrible facts of pitiless oppression, massacre of children, pauperism, and insecurity of life. The Russian Fabrics Inspectors’ Reports, the Reports of the Plauen Handelskammer, the Italian inquests, and the reports about the growing industries of India and Japan are full of the same revelations as the Reports of the Parliamentary Commissions of 1840 to 1842, or the modern revelations with regard to the “sweating system” at Whitechapel and Glasgow, London pauperism, and York unemployment. The Capital and Labour problem is thus universalised; but, at the same time, it is also simplified. To return to a state of affairs where corn is grown, and manufactured goods are fabricated, for the use of those very people who grow and produce them—such will be, no doubt, the problem to be solved during the next coming years of European history. Each region will become its own producer and its own consumer of manufactured goods. But that unavoidably implies that, at the same time, it will be its own producer and consumer of agricultural produce; and that is precisely what I am going to discuss next.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] During the census of 1902, there were in Austria 1,408,000 industrial establishments, with 1,787,000 horse-power, giving occupation to 4,049,300 workpeople; 1,128,000 workpeople were engaged in manufactures in Hungary.

[16] The net imports of raw cotton reached 1,180,000 cwts. in 1885, and 4,120,000 cwts. in 1908; the number of spindles grew from 880,000 in 1877 to 3,800,000 in 1907. The whole industry has grown up since 1859. In 1910 no less than 358,200 tons of pig-iron and 671,000 tons of steel were produced in Italy. The exports of textiles reached the following values in 1905-1910: Silks, from £17,800,000 to £24,794,000; cottons, £4,430,000 to £5,040,000; woollens, from £440,000 to £1,429,000.

[17] Times, August 27, 1912.

[18] The Economist, 12th May, 1894, p. 9: “A few years ago the Orizaba mills used entirely imported raw cotton; but now they use home-grown and home-spun cotton as much as possible.”

[19] Annuario Estadistico, 1911. They consumed 34,700 tons of raw cotton, and produced 13,936,300 pieces of cotton goods, and 554,000 cwts. of yarn.

[20] Schulze Gäwernitz, The Cotton Trade, etc., p. 123.

[21] In 1882 they had 5,633 looms and 95,937 spindles. Thirteen years later these figures were already doubled—there being 10,600 looms and 216,000 spindles. Now, or rather in 1909-1910, we find 60 jute mills, with 31,420 looms, 645,700 spindles, and 204,000 workpeople. The progress realised in the machinery is best seen from these figures. The exports of jute stuffs from India, which were only £1,543,870 in 1884-1885, reached £11,333,000 in 1910-1911. (See [Appendix H].)

[22] Textile Recorder, 15th October, 1888.

[23] 39,200,000 lb. of yarn were imported in 1886 as against 6,435,000 lb. of home-spun yarn. In 1889 the figures were: 56,633,000 lb. imported and 26,809,000 lb. home-spun.

[24] In 1910 the imports of cotton and woollens were only £2,650,500, while the exports of cotton yarn, cotton shirtings, and silk manufactures reached a value of £8,164,800.

[25] The mining industry has grown as follows:—Copper extracted: 2,407 tons in 1875; 49,000 in 1909. Coal: 567,200 tons in 1875: 15,535,000 in 1909. Iron: 3,447 tons in 1875; 15,268 in 1887; 65,000 in 1909. (K. Rathgen, Japan’s Volkwirthschaft und Staatshaushaltung, Leipzig, 1891; Consular Reports.)

[26] Workers employed in manufacturing industries: 2,054,000 in 1870, 4,712,600 in 1890, and 6,723,900 in 1905 (including salaried officials and clerks). Value of produce: 3,385,861,000 dollars in 1870, 9,372,437,280 dollars in 1890, and 16,866,707,000 in 1905. Yearly production per head of workers: 1,648 dollars in 1870, 1,989 dollars in 1890, and 2,514 dollars in 1905.

[27] About the cotton industry in the United States, see Appendix I.

[28] It was from 7,255,076 to 9,811,620 tons of pig-iron during the years 1890-94, and 27,303,600 long tons in 1910 (£85,000,000 worth). The total value of products of the steel works and rolling mills reached in 1909 the immense value of £197,144,500. In the Statesman’s Year-book for the years 1910-1912, the reader may find most striking figures concerning the rapid growth of the iron and steel industry in the States. We have nothing parallel to it in Europe.

[29] “The largest output of one blast-furnace in Great Britain does not exceed 750 tons in the week, while in America it had reached 2000 tons” (Nature, 19th Nov., 1891, p. 65). In 1909 the Bessemer steel plants had 99 converters; total daily capacity of ingots or direct castings, double turn, in 1909, 45,983 tons.

[30] J. R. Dodge, Farm and Factory: Aids to Agriculture from other Industries, New York and London, 1884, p. 111. I can but highly recommend this little work to those interested in the question.

[31] Per head of population the exports of British produce appear, in shillings, as follows:—

1876 121s.
1877 119s.
1878 114s.
1879 112s.
1880 129s.
1881 134s.
1882 137s.
1883 135s.
1884 130s.

1885 118s.
1886 117s.
1887 121s.
1888 127s.
1889 134s.
1890 141s.
1891 131s.
1892 119s.
1893 114s.

1894 111s.
1895 112s.
1896 116s.
1897 117s.
1898 116s.
1899 130s.
1900 142s.
1901 135s.
1902 135s.

1903 138s.
1904 141s.
1905 153s.
1906 173s.
1907 194s.
1908 171s.
1909 192s.
1910 201s.

[32] The International Federation of the Cotton Industry employers gave, on March 1, 1909, the following numbers of spindles in the different countries of the Old and New Worlds:—

[33] J. Stephen Jeans, The Iron Trade of Great Britain (London, Methuen), 1905, p. 46. The reader will find in this interesting little work valuable data concerning the growth and improvement of the iron industry in different countries.

CHAPTER III.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF AGRICULTURE.

The development of agriculture—Over-population prejudice—Can the soil of Great Britain feed its inhabitants?—British agriculture—Compared with agriculture in France; in Belgium; in Denmark—Market-gardening; its achievements—Is it profitable to grow wheat in Great Britain?—American agriculture: intensive culture in the States.

The industrial and commercial history of the world during the last fifty years has been a history of decentralisation of industry. It was not a mere shifting of the centre of gravity of commerce, such as Europe witnessed in the past, when the commercial hegemony migrated from Italy to Spain, to Holland, and finally to Britain: it had a much deeper meaning, as it excluded the very possibility of commercial or industrial hegemony. It has shown the growth of quite new conditions, and new conditions require new adaptations. To endeavour to revive the past would be useless: a new departure must be taken by civilised nations.

Of course, there will be plenty of voices to argue that the former supremacy of the pioneers must be maintained at any price: all pioneers are in the habit of saying so. It will be suggested that the pioneers must attain such a superiority of technical knowledge and organisation as to enable them to beat all their younger competitors; that force must be resorted to if necessary. But force is reciprocal; and if the god of war always sides with the strongest battalions, those battalions are strongest which fight for new rights against outgrown privileges. As to the honest longing for more technical education—surely let us all have as much of it as possible: it will be a boon for humanity; for humanity, of course—not for a single nation, because knowledge cannot be cultivated for home use only. Knowledge and invention, boldness of thought and enterprise, conquests of genius and improvements of social organisation have become international growths; and no kind of progress—intellectual, industrial or social—can be kept within political boundaries; it crosses the seas, it pierces the mountains; steppes are no obstacle to it. Knowledge and inventive powers are now so thoroughly international that if a simple newspaper paragraph announces to-morrow that the problem of storing force, of printing without inking, or of aerial navigation, has received a practical solution in one country of the world, we may feel sure that within a few weeks the same problem will be solved, almost in the same way, by several inventors of different nationalities.[34] Continually we learn that the same scientific discovery, or technical invention, has been made within a few days’ distance, in countries a thousand miles apart; as if there were a kind of atmosphere which favours the germination of a given idea at a given moment. And such an atmosphere exists: steam, print and the common stock of knowledge have created it.

Those who dream of monopolising technical genius are therefore fifty years behind the times. The world—the wide, wide world—is now the true domain of knowledge; and if each nation displays some special capacities in some special branch, the various capacities of different nations compensate one another, and the advantages which could be derived from them would be only temporary. The fine British workmanship in mechanical arts, the American boldness for gigantic enterprise, the French systematic mind, and the German pedagogy, are becoming international capacities. Sir William Armstrong, in his works established in Italy and Japan, has already communicated to Italians and Japanese those capacities for managing huge iron masses which have been nurtured on the Tyne; the uproarious American spirit of enterprise pervades the Old World; the French taste for harmony becomes European taste; and German pedagogy—improved, I dare say—is at home in Russia. So, instead of trying to keep life in the old channels, it would be better to see what the new conditions are, what duties they impose on our generation.

The characters of the new conditions are plain, and their consequences are easy to understand. As the manufacturing nations of West Europe are meeting with steadily growing difficulties in selling their manufactured goods abroad, and getting food in exchange, they will be compelled to grow their food at home; they will be bound to rely on home customers for their manufactures, and on home producers for their food. And the sooner they do so the better.

Two great objections stand, however, in the way against the general acceptance of such conclusions. We have been taught, both by economists and politicians, that the territories of the West European States are so overcrowded with inhabitants that they cannot grow all the food and raw produce which are necessary for the maintenance of their steadily increasing populations. Therefore the necessity of exporting manufactured goods and of importing food. And we are told, moreover, that even if it were possible to grow in Western Europe all the food necessary for its inhabitants, there would be no advantage in doing so as long as the same food can be got cheaper from abroad. Such are the present teachings and the ideas which are current in society at large. And yet it is easy to prove that both are totally erroneous: plenty of food could be grown on the territories of Western Europe for much more than their present populations, and an immense benefit would be derived from doing so. These are the two points which I have now to discuss.

To begin by taking the most disadvantageous case: is it possible that the soil of Great Britain, which at present yields food for one-third only of its inhabitants, could provide all the necessary amount and variety of food for 41,000,000 human beings when it covers only 56,000,000 acres all told—forests and rocks, marshes and peat-bogs, cities, railways and fields—out of which only 33,000,000 acres are considered as cultivable?[35] The current opinion is, that it by no means can; and that opinion is so inveterate that we even see men of science, who are generally cautious when dealing with current opinions, endorse that opinion without even taking the trouble of verifying it. It is accepted as an axiom. And yet, as soon as we try to find out any argument in its favour, we discover that it has not the slightest foundation, either in facts or in judgment based upon well-known facts.

Let us take, for instance, J. B. Lawes’ estimates of crops which were published every year in The Times. In his estimate of the year 1887 he made the remark that during the eight harvest years 1853-1860 “nearly three-fourths of the aggregate amount of wheat consumed in the United Kingdom was of home growth, and little more than one-fourth was derived from foreign sources”; but five-and-twenty years later the figures were almost reversed—that is, “during the eight years 1879-1886, little more than one-third has been provided by home crops and nearly two-thirds by imports.” But neither the increase of population by 8,000,000 nor the increase of consumption of wheat by six-tenths of a bushel per head could account for the change. In the years 1853-1860 the soil of Britain nourished one inhabitant on every two acres cultivated: why did it require three acres in order to nourish the same inhabitant in 1887? The answer is plain: merely and simply because agriculture had fallen into neglect.

In fact, the area under wheat had been reduced since 1853-1860 by full 1,590,000 acres, and therefore the average crop of the years 1883-1886 was below the average crop of 1853-1860 by more than 40,000,000 bushels; and this deficit alone represented the food of more than 7,000,000 inhabitants. At the same time the area under barley, oats, beans, and other spring crops had also been reduced by a further 560,000 acres, which, alone, at the low average of thirty bushels per acre, would have represented the cereals necessary to complete the above, for the same 7,000,000 inhabitants. It can thus be said that if the United Kingdom imported cereals for 17,000,000 inhabitants in 1887, instead of for 10,000,000 in 1860, it was simply because more than 2,000,000 acres had gone out of cultivation.[36]

These facts are well known; but usually they are met with the remark that the character of agriculture had been altered: that instead of growing wheat, meat and milk were produced in this country. However, the figures for 1887, compared with the figures for 1860, show that the same downward movement took place under the heads of green crops and the like. The area under potatoes was reduced by 280,000 acres; under turnips by 180,000 acres; and although there was an increase under the heads of mangold, carrots, etc., still the aggregate area under all these crops was reduced by a further 330,000 acres. An increase of area was found only for permanent pasture (2,800,000 acres) and grass under rotation (1,600,000 acres); but we should look in vain for a corresponding increase of live stock. The increase of live stock which took place during those twenty-seven years was not sufficient to cover even the area reclaimed from waste land.[37]

Since the year 1887 affairs went, however, from worse to worse. If we take Great Britain alone, we see that in 1885 the area under all corn crops was 8,392,006 acres; that is very small, indeed, in comparison to the area which could have been cultivated; but even that little was further reduced to 7,400,227 acres in 1895. The area under wheat was 2,478,318 acres in 1885 (as against 3,630,300 in 1874); but it dwindled away to 1,417,641 acres in 1895, while the area under the other cereals increased by a trifle only—from 5,198,026 acres to 5,462,184—the total loss on all cereals being nearly 1,000,000 acres in ten years! Another 5,000,000 people were thus compelled to get their food from abroad.

Did the area under green crops increase correspondingly, as it would have done if it were only the character of agriculture that had changed? Not in the least! This area was further reduced by nearly 500,000 acres (3,521,602 in 1885, 3,225,762 in 1895, and 3,006,000 in 1909-1911). Or was the area under clover and grasses in rotation increased in proportion to all these reductions? Alas no! It also was reduced (4,654,173 acres in 1885, 4,729,801 in 1895, and 4,164,000 acres in 1909-1911). In short, taking all the land that is under crops in rotation (17,201,490 acres in 1885, 16,166,950 acres in 1895, 14,795,570 only in 1905, and 14,682,550 in 1909-1911), we see that within the last twenty-six years another 2,500,000 acres went out of cultivation, without any compensation whatever. It went to increase that already enormous area of more than 17,000,000 acres (17,460,000 in 1909-1911)—more than one-half of the cultivable area—which goes under the head of “permanent pasture,” and hardly suffices to feed one cow on each three acres!

Need I say, after that, that quite to the contrary of what we are told about the British agriculturists becoming “meat-makers” instead of “wheat-growers,” no corresponding increase of live stock took place during the last twenty-five years. Far from devoting the land freed from cereals to “meat-making,” the country further reduced its live stock in 1885-1895, and began to show a slight increase during the last few years only. It had 6,597,964 head of horned cattle in 1885, 6,354,336 in 1895, and 7,057,520 in 1909-1911; 26,534,600 sheep in 1885, 25,792,200 in 1895, and from 26,500,000 to 27,610,000 in 1909-1911. True, the number of horses increased; every butcher and greengrocer runs now a horse “to take orders at the gents’ doors” (in Sweden and Switzerland, by the way, they do it by telephone). But if we take the numbers of horses used in agriculture, unbroken, and kept for breeding, we find only small oscillations between 1,408,790 in 1885 and 1,553,000 in 1909. But numbers of horses are imported, as also the oats and a considerable amount of the hay that is required for feeding them.[38] And if the consumption of meat has really increased in this country, it is due to cheap imported meat, not to the meat that would be produced in these islands.[39]

In short, agriculture has not changed its direction, as we are often told; it simply went down in all directions. Land is going out of culture at a perilous rate, while the latest improvements in market-gardening, fruit-growing and poultry-keeping are but a mere trifle if we compare them with what has been done in the same direction in France, Belgium and America.

It must be said that during the last few years there was a slight improvement. The area under all corn crops was slightly increasing, and it fluctuated about 7,000,000 acres, the increase being especially notable for wheat (1,906,000 acres in 1911 as against 1,625,450 in 1907), while the areas under barley and oats were slightly diminished. But with all that, the surface under corn crops is still nearly one-and-a-half million acres below what it was in 1885, and nearly two-and-a-half million acres below 1874. This represents, let us remember it, the bread-food of ten million people.

The cause of this general downward movement is self-evident. It is the desertion, the abandonment of the land. Each crop requiring human labour has had its area reduced; and almost one-half of the agricultural labourers have been sent away since 1861 to reinforce the ranks of the unemployed in the cities,[40] so that far from being over-populated, the fields of Britain are starved of human labour, as James Caird used to say. The British nation does not work on her soil; she is prevented from doing so; and the would-be economists complain that the soil will not nourish its inhabitants!

I once took a knapsack and went on foot out of London, through Sussex. I had read Léonce de Lavergne’s work and expected to find a soil busily cultivated; but neither round London nor still less further south did I see men in the fields. In the Weald I could walk for twenty miles without crossing anything but heath or woodlands, rented as pheasant-shooting grounds to “London gentlemen,” as the labourers said. “Ungrateful soil” was my first thought; but then I would occasionally come to a farm at the crossing of two roads and see the same soil bearing a rich crop; and my next thought was tel seigneur, telle terre, as the French peasants say. Later on I saw the rich fields of the midland counties; but even there I was struck by not perceiving the same busy human labour which I was accustomed to admire on the Belgian and French fields. But I ceased to wonder when I learnt that only 1,383,000 men and women in England and Wales work in the fields, while more than 16,000,000 belong to the “professional, domestic, indefinite, and unproductive class,” as these pitiless statisticians say. One million human beings cannot productively cultivate an area of 33,000,000 acres, unless they can resort to the Bonanza farm’s methods of culture.

Again, taking Harrow as the centre of my excursions, I could walk five miles towards London, or turning my back upon it, and I could see nothing east or west but meadow land on which they hardly cropped two tons of hay per acre—scarcely enough to keep alive one milch cow on each two acres. Man is conspicuous by his absence from those meadows; he rolls them with a heavy roller in the spring; he spreads some manure every two or three years; then he disappears until the time has come to make hay. And that—within ten miles from Charing Cross, close to a city with 5,000,000 inhabitants, supplied with Flemish and Jersey potatoes, French salads and Canadian apples. In the hands of the Paris gardeners, each thousand acres situated within the same distance from the city would be cultivated by at least 2,000 human beings, who would get vegetables to the value of from £50 to £300 per acre. But here the acres which only need human hands to become an inexhaustible source of golden crops lie idle, and they say to us, “Heavy clay!” without even knowing that in the hands of man there are no unfertile soils; that the most fertile soils are not in the prairies of America, nor in the Russian steppes; that they are in the peat-bogs of Ireland, on the sand downs of the northern sea-coast of France, on the craggy mountains of the Rhine, where they have been made by man’s hands.

The most striking fact is, however, that in some undoubtedly fertile parts of the country things are even in a worse condition. My heart simply ached when I saw the state in which land is kept in South Devon, and when I learned to know what “permanent pasture” means. Field after field is covered with nothing but grass, three inches high, and thistles in profusion. Twenty, thirty such fields can be seen at one glance from the top of every hill; and thousands of acres are in that state, notwithstanding that the grandfathers of the present generation have devoted a formidable amount of labour to the clearing of that land from the stones, to fencing it, roughly draining it and the like. In every direction I could see abandoned cottages and orchards going to ruin. A whole population has disappeared, and even its last vestiges must disappear if things continue to go on as they have gone. And this takes place in a part of the country endowed with a most fertile soil and possessed of a climate which is certainly more congenial than the climate of Jersey in spring and early summer—a land upon which even the poorest cottagers occasionally raise potatoes as early as the first half of May. But how can that land be cultivated when there is nobody to cultivate it? “We have fields; men go by, but never go in,” an old labourer said to me; and so it is in reality.[41]

Such were my impressions of British agriculture twenty years ago. Unfortunately, both the official statistical data and the mass of private evidence published since tend to show that but little improvement took place in the general conditions of agriculture in this country within the last twenty years. Some successful attempts in various new directions have been made in different parts of the country, and I will have the pleasure to mention them further on, the more so as they show what a quite average soil in these islands can give when it is properly treated. But over large areas, especially in the southern counties, the general conditions are even worse than they were twenty years ago.

Altogether one cannot read the mass of review and newspaper articles, and books dealing with British agriculture that have been published lately, without realising that the agricultural depression which began in the “seventies” and the “eighties” of the nineteenth century had causes much more deeply seated than the fall in the prices of wheat in consequence of American competition. However, it would lie beyond the scope of this book to enter here into such a discussion. Moreover, anyone who will read a few review articles written from the points of view of different parties, or consult such books as that of Mr. Christopher Turnor,[42] or study the elaborate inquest made by Rider Haggard in twenty-six counties of England—paying more attention to the data accumulated in this book than to the sometimes biassed conclusions of the author—will soon see himself what are the causes which hamper the development of British agriculture.[43]

In Scotland the conditions are equally bad. The population described as “rural” is in a steady decrease: in 1911 it was already less than 800,000; and as regards the agricultural labourers, their number has decreased by 42,370 (from 135,970 to 93,600) in the twenty years, 1881 to 1901. The land goes out of culture, while the area under “deer forests”—that is, under hunting grounds established upon what formerly was arable land for the amusement of the rich—increases at an appalling rate. No need to say that at the same time the Scotch population is emigrating, and Scotland is depopulated at an appalling speed.

My chief purpose being to show here what can and ought to be obtained from the land under a proper and intelligent treatment, I shall only indicate one of the disadvantages of the systems of husbandry in vogue in this country. Both landlords and farmers gradually came of late to pursue other aims than that of obtaining from the land the greatest amount of produce than can be obtained; and when this problem of a maximum productivity of the land arose before the European nations, and therefore a complete modification of the methods of husbandry was rendered imperative, such a modification was not accomplished in this country. While in France, Belgium, Germany and Denmark the agriculturists did their best to meet the effects of American competition by rendering their culture more intensive in all directions, in this country the already antiquated method of reducing the area under corn crops and laying land for grass continues to prevail, although it ought to be evident that mere grazing will pay no more, and that some effort in the right direction would increase the returns of the corn crops, as also those of the roots and plants cultivated for industrial purposes. The land continues to go out of culture, while the problem of the day is to render culture more and more intensive.

Many causes have combined to produce that undesirable result. The concentration of land-ownership in the hands of big landowners; the high profits obtained previously; the development of a class of both landlords and farmers who rely chiefly upon other incomes than those they draw from the land, and for whom farming has thus become a sort of pleasant by-occupation or sport; the rapid development of game reserves for sportsmen, both British and foreign; the absence of men of initiative who would have shown to the nation the necessity of a new departure; the absence of a desire to win the necessary knowledge, and the absence of institutions which could widely spread practical agricultural knowledge and introduce improved seeds and seedlings, as the Experimental Farms of the United States and Canada are doing; the dislike of that spirit of agricultural co-operation to which the Danish farmers owe their successes, and so on—all these stand in the way of the unavoidable change in the methods of farming, and produce the results of which the British writers on agriculture are complaining.[44] But it is self-evident that in order to compete with countries where machinery is largely used and new methods of farming are resorted to (including the industrial treatment of farm produce in sugar works, starch works, and the drying of vegetables, etc., connected with farming), the old methods cannot do; especially when the farmer has to pay a rent of twenty, forty, and occasionally fifty shillings per acre for wheat-lands.

It may be said, of course, that this opinion strangely contrasts with the well-known superiority of British agriculture. Do we not know, indeed, that British crops average twenty-eight to thirty bushels of wheat per acre, while in France they reach only from seventeen to twenty bushels? Does it not stand in all almanacs that Britain gets every year £200,000,000 sterling worth of animal produce—milk, cheese, meat and wool—from her fields? All that is true, and there is no doubt that in many respects British agriculture is superior to that of many other nations. As regards obtaining the greatest amount of produce with the least amount of labour, Britain undoubtedly took the lead until she was superseded by America in the Bonanza farms (now disappeared or rapidly disappearing). Again, as regards the fine breeds of cattle, the splendid state of the meadows and the results obtained in separate farms, there is much to be learned from Britain. But a closer acquaintance with British agriculture as a whole discloses many features of inferiority.

However splendid, a meadow remains a meadow, much inferior in productivity to a corn-field; and the fine breeds of cattle appear to be poor creatures as long as each ox requires three acres of land to be fed upon. As regards the crops, certainly one may indulge in some admiration at the average twenty-eight or thirty bushels grown in this country; but when we learn that only 1,600,000 to 1,900,000 acres out of the cultivable 33,000,000 bear such crops, we are quite disappointed. Anyone could obtain like results if he were to put all his manure into one-twentieth part of the area which he possesses. Again, the twenty-eight to thirty bushels no longer appear to us so satisfactory when we learn that without any manuring, merely by means of a good culture, they have obtained at Rothamstead an average of 14 bushels per acre from the same plot of land for forty consecutive years;[45] while Mr. Prout, in his farm near Sawbridgeworth (Herts), on a cold heavy clay, has obtained since 1861 crops of from thirty to thirty-eight bushels of wheat, year after year, without any farm manure at all, by good steam ploughing and artificial manure only. (R. Haggard, I. 528.) Under the allotment system the crops reach forty bushels. In some farms they occasionally attain even fifty and fifty-seven bushels per acre.

Fig. 1.—Proportion of the cultivated area which is given to cereals altogether, and to wheat, in Great Britain and Ireland.

If we intend to have a correct appreciation of British agriculture, we must not base it upon what is obtained on a few selected and well-manured plots; we must inquire what is done with the territory, taken as a whole.[46] Now, out of each 1,000 acres of the aggregate territory of England, Wales and Scotland, 435 acres are left under wood, coppice, heath, buildings, and so on. We need not find fault with that division, because it depends very much upon natural causes. In France and Belgium one-third of the territory is in like manner also treated as uncultivable, although portions of it are continually reclaimed and brought under culture. But, leaving aside the “uncultivable” portion, let us see what is done with the 565 acres out of 1,000 of the “cultivable” part (32,145,930 acres in Great Britain in 1910). First of all, it is divided into two parts, and one of them, the largest—308 acres out of 1,000—is left under “permanent pasture,” that is, in most cases it is entirely uncultivated. Very little hay is obtained from it,[47] and some cattle are grazed upon it. More than one-half of the cultivable area is thus left without cultivation, and only 257 acres out of each 1,000 acres are under culture. Out of these last, 124 acres are under corn crops, twenty-one acres under potatoes, fifty-three acres under green crops, and seventy-three acres under clover fields and grasses under rotation. And finally, out of the 124 acres given to corn crops, the best thirty-three, and some years only twenty-five acres (one-fortieth part of the territory, one-twenty-third of the cultivable area), are picked out and sown with wheat. They are well cultivated, well manured, and upon them an average of from twenty-eight to thirty bushels to the acre is obtained; and upon these twenty-five or thirty acres out of 1,000 the world superiority of British agriculture is based.

The net result of all that is, that on nearly 33,000,000 acres of cultivable land the food is grown for one-third part only of the population (more than two-thirds of the food it consumes is imported), and we may say accordingly that, although nearly two-thirds of the territory is cultivable, British agriculture provides home-grown food for each 125 or 135 inhabitants only per square mile (out of 466). In other words, nearly three acres of the cultivable area are required to grow the food for each person. Let us then see what is done with the land in France and Belgium.

Now, if we simply compare the average thirty bushels per acre of wheat in Great Britain with the average nineteen to twenty bushels grown in France within the last ten years, the comparison is all in favour of these islands; but such averages are of little value because the two systems of agriculture are totally different in the two countries. The Frenchman also has his picked and heavily manured “twenty-five to thirty acres” in the north of France and in Ile-de-France, and from these picked acres he obtains average crops ranging from thirty to thirty-three bushels.[48] However, he sows with wheat, not only the best picked out acres, but also such fields on the Central Plateau and in Southern France as hardly yield ten, eight and even six bushels to the acre, without irrigation; and these low crops reduce the average for the whole country.

The Frenchman cultivates much that is left here under permanent pasture—and this is what is described as his “inferiority” in agriculture. In fact, although the proportion between what we have named the “cultivable area” and the total territory is very much the same in France as it is in Great Britain (624 acres out of each 1,000 acres of the territory), the area under wheat crops is nearly six times as great, in proportion, as what it is in Great Britain (182 acres instead of twenty-five or thirty, out of each 1,000 acres): the corn crops altogether cover nearly two-fifths of the cultivable area (375 acres out of 1000), and large areas are given besides to green crops, industrial crops, vine, fruit and vegetables.

Taking everything into consideration, although the Frenchman keeps less cattle, and especially grazes less sheep than the Briton, he nevertheless obtains from his soil nearly all the food that he and his cattle consume. He imports, in an average year, but one-tenth only of what the nation consumes, and he exports to this country considerable quantities of food produce (£10,000,000 worth), not only from the south, but also, and especially, from the shores of the Channel (Brittany butter and vegetables; fruit and vegetables from the suburbs of Paris, and so on).[49]

The net result is that, although one-third part of the territory is also treated as “uncultivable,” the soil of France yields the food for 170 inhabitants per square mile (out of 188), that is, for forty persons more, per square mile, than this country.[50]

It is thus apparent that the comparison with France is not so much in favour of this country as it is said to be; and it will be still less favourable when we come, in our next chapter, to horticulture.

The comparison with Belgium is even more striking—the more so as the two systems of culture are similar in both countries. To begin with, in Belgium we also find an average crop of over thirty bushels of wheat to the acre; but the area given to wheat is five times as big as in Great Britain, in comparison to the cultivable area, and the cereals cover two-fifths of the land available for culture.[51] The land is so well cultivated that the average crops for the years 1890-1899 (the very bad year of 1891 being left out of account) were from twenty-six and a half to twenty-eight and a half bushels per acre for winter wheat, and reached an average of thirty-three and a half bushels in 1900-1904; over fifty-four bushels for oats (thirty-five to forty-one and a half in Great Britain), and from forty to forty-three and a half bushels for winter barley (twenty-nine to thirty-five in Great Britain); while on no less than 475,000 acres catch crops of swedes (3,345,000 tons), carrots (155,000 tons), and more than 500,000 of lucerne and other grasses were obtained.[52]

As to extraordinarily heavy crops, Mr. Seebohm Rowntree mentions, for instance, the wheat crop in the commune of Oirbeck, near Louvain, which was, in 1906, on the average, fifty-seven bushels per acre, while the average of the whole country was only thirty-four bushels, or a yield of 111½ bushels of oats in the commune of Neuve-Eglise, while the average for Belgium was fifty-four bushels, and so on, the average crops of several communes for some cereals being seventy-three per cent. in excess of the average for Belgium, and from 106 to 153 per cent. for roots.[53]

All taken, they grow in Belgium more than 76,000,000 bushels of cereals—that is, fifteen and seven-tenths bushels per acre of the cultivable area—while the corresponding figure for Great Britain is only eight and a half bushels; and they keep almost twice as many cattle upon each cultivable acre as is kept in Great Britain.[54]

Moreover, they even export cattle and horses. Up to 1890 Belgium exported from 36,000 to 94,000 head of cattle, from 42,000 to 70,000 sheep, and from 60,000 to 108,600 swine. In 1890 these exports suddenly came to an end—probably in consequence of a prohibition of such imports into Germany. Only horses continue to be exported to the amount of about 25,000 horses and foals every year.

Large portions of the land are given besides to the culture of industrial plants, potatoes for spirit, beet for sugar, and so on.

However, it must not be believed that the soil of Belgium is more fertile than the soil of this country. On the contrary, to use the words of Laveleye, “only one half, or less, of the territory offers natural conditions which are favourable for agriculture”; the other half consists of a gravelly soil, or sands, “the natural sterility of which could be overpowered only by heavy manuring.” Man, not nature, has given to the Belgium soil its present productivity. With this soil and labour, Belgium succeeds in supplying nearly all the food of a population which is denser than that of England and Wales, and numbers 589 inhabitants to the square mile.

Fig. 2.—Proportion of the cultivated area which is given to cereals altogether, and to wheat, in Belgium. The square which encloses the wheat square represents the area given to both wheat and a mixture of wheat with rye.

If the exports and imports of agricultural produce from and into Belgium be taken into account, we can ask ourselves whether Laveleye’s conclusions are not still good, and whether only one inhabitant out of each ten to twenty requires imported food. In the years 1880-1885 the soil of Belgium supplied with home-grown food no less than 490 inhabitants per square mile, and there remained something for export—no less than £1,000,000 worth of agricultural produce being exported every year to Great Britain. But it is not possible to say with certitude whether the conditions are the same at the present time.

Fig. 3.—Proportion of cultivated and uncultivated areas in Great Britain, Belgium, and France. a, Wheat; b, wheat and rye mixed; c, other cereals; d′, green crops; d, permanent pasture; e, uncultivated.

Since 1880, when the duties on imported cereals were abolished (they were before that sixpence for each 220 lb.), and corn could be imported free, “the importers were no more obliged to make special declarations for merchandise which had to be re-exported; they declared their imports as if they were destined to be used within the country.”[55] The result was, that while in the year 1870 the imports of cereals were 154 lb. per head of population, the same imports rose to 286 lb. in 1880. But no one can say how much of these 286 lb. is consumed in Belgium itself; and if we deduct from the total of the imports the quantities re-exported the same year, we obtain figures which cannot be relied upon.[56] It is therefore safer to consider the figures of the annual production of cereals in Belgium, such as they are given in the official Annuaire.

Now, if we take the figures given in the Annuaire Statistique de la Belgique for the year 1911, we come to the following results. The annual agricultural census, which is being made since 1901, gives for the year 1909 that 2,290,300,000 lb. of wheat, rye, and wheat mixed with rye were obtained on all the farms of Belgium larger than two and a half acres (2,002,000,000 lb. in 1895). Besides, 219,200,000 lb. of barley, 1,393,000,000 lb. of oats, and a considerable quantity of oleaginous grains have been produced.

It is generally accepted that the average consumption of both winter and spring cereals attains 502 lb. per head of population; and as the population of Belgium was 7,000,000 on January 1, 1907, it appears that no less than 3,524,400,000 lb. of cereals would have been required to supply the annual food of the population. If we compare this figure with that of the annual production just mentioned, we see then that, notwithstanding the considerable decrease of the area given to wheat since the abolition of the entrance duties, Belgium still produces at least two-thirds of the cereal food required for its very dense population, which is nearly 600 persons per square mile (596 in 1907).

It must be noticed that we should have come to a still higher figure if we took into account the other cereals (to say nothing of the leguminous plants and vegetables grown and consumed in Belgium), and still more so if we took into account what is grown upon the small holdings less than two and a half acres each. The number of such small holdings was 554,041 in 1895, and the number of people living upon them reached nearly 2,000,000. They are not included in the official statistics, and yet upon most of them some cereals are grown, in addition to vegetables and fodder for cattle.

If Belgium produces in cereals the food of more than two-thirds of its very dense population, this is already a quite respectable figure; but it must also be said that it exports every year considerable quantities of products of the soil. Thus, in the year 1910 she exported 254,730 tons of vegetables (as against 187,000 imported), 40,000 tons of fruit, 34,000 tons of plants and flowers (the whole nearly £3,000,000 worth), 256,000 of oleaginous grains, 18,500 tons of wool, nearly 60,000 tons of flax, and so on. I do not mention the exports of butter, rabbits, skins, an immense quantity of sugar (about 180,000 tons), the vegetable oils and the spirits, because considerable quantities of beet and potatoes are imported. In short, we have here an export of agricultural produce grown in the country itself attaining the figure of 48s. per head of population.

All taken, there is thus no possibility of contesting the fact, that if the soil of Great Britain were cultivated only as the unfertile soil of Belgium is cultivated—notwithstanding all the social obstacles which stand in the way of an intensive culture, in Belgium as elsewhere—a much greater part of the population of these islands would obtain its food from the soil of its own land than is the case nowadays.[57]

On the other side it must not be forgotten that Belgium is a manufacturing country which exports, moreover, manufactured home-made goods to the value of 198s. per head of population, and 150s. worth of crude or half-manufactured produce, while the total exports from the United Kingdom have only lately attained during the extraordinary year of 1911 the value of 201s. per inhabitant. As to separate parts of the Belgian territory, the small and naturally unfertile province of West Flanders not only grew in 1890 the food of its 580 inhabitants on the square mile, but exported agricultural produce to the value of 25s. per head of its population. And yet no one can read Laveleye’s masterly work without coming to the conclusion that Flemish agriculture would have realised still better results, were it not hampered in its growth by the steady and heavy increase of rent. In the face of the rent being increased each nine years, many farmers have lately abstained from further improvements.

Another example of what could be achieved by means of an effort of the nation seconded by its educated classes is given by Denmark. After the war of 1864, which ended in the loss of one of their provinces, the Danes made an effort widely to spread education amongst their peasants, and to develop at the same time an intensive culture of the soil. The result of these efforts is now quite evident. The rural population of Denmark, instead of flocking to the towns, has been increasing: in five years, 1906-1911, it rose from 1,565,585 to 1,647,350. Out of a total population of 2,775,100, no less than 990,900 find their living in agriculture, dairy work, and forestry. With a very poor soil, they have a cultivated area a trifle below 7,000,000 acres, out of which 2,773,320 acres are under cereals. Their wheat crops are on the average 40⁶/₁₀ bushels per acre, and the value of the home-grown food-stuffs is estimated at £40,000,000, which makes a little less than £6 per acre. As to their exports of home-grown produce, they exceed the imports by £14,483,000. The chief cause of these successes are: A highly developed agricultural education, town markets accessible to all the growers, and, above all, co-operation, which again is a result of the effort that was made by the educated classes after the unfortunate war of 1864.

Everyone knows that it is now Danish butter which rules the prices in the London market, and that this butter is of a high quality, which can only be attained in co-operative creameries with cold storage and certain uniform methods in producing butter. But it is not generally known that the Siberian butter, which is now imported in immense quantities into this country, is also a creation of the Danish co-operators. When they began to export their butter in large quantities, they used to import butter for their own use from the southern parts of the West Siberian provinces of Tobolsk and Tomsk, which are covered with prairies very similar to those of Winnipeg in Canada. At the outset this butter was of a most inferior quality, as it was made by every peasant household separately. The Danes began therefore to teach co-operation to the Russian peasants, and they were rapidly understood by the intelligent population of this fertile region. The co-operative creameries began to spread with an astounding rapidity, without us knowing for some time wherefrom came this interesting movement. At the present time a steamer loaded with Siberian butter leaves every week one of the Baltic ports and brings to London many thousands of casks of Siberian butter. If I am not wrong, Finland has also joined lately in the same export.

Without going as far as China, I might quote similar examples from elsewhere, especially from Lombardy. But the above will be enough to caution the reader against hasty conclusions as to the impossibility of feeding 46,000,000 people from 78,000,000 acres. They also will enable me to draw the following conclusions: (1) If the soil of the United Kingdom were cultivated only as it was forty-five years ago, 24,000,000 people, instead of 17,000,000, could live on home-grown food; and this culture, while giving occupation to an additional 750,000 men, would give nearly 3,000,000 wealthy home customers to the British manufactures. (2) If the cultivable area of the United Kingdom were cultivated as the soil is cultivated on the average in Belgium, the United Kingdom would have food for at least 37,000,000 inhabitants; and it might export agricultural produce without ceasing to manufacture, so as freely to supply all the needs of a wealthy population. And finally (3), if the population of this country came to be doubled, all that would be required for producing the food for 90,000,000 inhabitants would be to cultivate the soil as it is cultivated in the best farms of this country, in Lombardy, and in Flanders, and to utilise some meadows, which at present lie almost unproductive, in the same way as the neighbourhoods of the big cities in France are utilised for market-gardening. All these are not fancy dreams, but mere realities; nothing but the modest conclusions from what we see round about us, without any allusion to the agriculture of the future.

If we want, however, to know what agriculture can be, and what can be grown on a given amount of soil, we must apply for information to such regions as the district of Saffelare in East Flanders, the island of Jersey, or the irrigated meadows of Lombardy, which are mentioned in the next chapter. Or else we may apply to the market-gardeners in this country, or in the neighbourhoods of Paris, or in Holland, or to the “truck farms” in America, and so on.

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. Science seldom guided them, and sometimes misguided—as was the case with Liebig’s theories, developed to the extreme by his followers, who induced us to treat plants as glass recipients of chemical drugs, and who forgot that the only science capable of dealing with life and growth is physiology, not chemistry. 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 50 to 100 tons of various vegetables on the same space; not £5 worth of hay but £100 worth of vegetables, of the plainest description, cabbage and carrots, and more than £200 worth under intensive horticultural treatment. This is where agriculture is going now.

We know that the dearest of all varieties of our staple food is meat; and those who are not vegetarians, either by persuasion or by necessity, consume on the average 225 lb. of meat—that is, roughly speaking, a little less than the third part of an ox—every year. And we have seen that, even in this country, and Belgium, two to three acres are wanted for keeping one head of horned cattle; so that a community of, say, 1,000,000 inhabitants would have to reserve somewhere about 1,000,000 acres of land for supplying it with meat. But if we go to the farm of M. Goppart—one of the promoters of ensilage in France—we shall see him growing, on a drained and well-manured field, no less than an average of 120,000 lb. of corn-grass to the acre, which gives 30,000 lb. of dry hay—that is, the food of one horned beast per acre. The produce is thus trebled.

As to beetroot, which is used also for feeding cattle, Mr. Champion, at Whitby, succeeded, with the help of sewage, in growing 100,000 lb. of beet on each acre, and occasionally 150,000 and 200,000 lb. He thus grew on each acre the food of, at least, two or three head of cattle. And such crops are not isolated facts; thus, M. Gros, at Autun, succeeds in cropping 600,000 lb. of beet and carrots, which crop would permit him to keep four horned cattle on each acre. In fact, crops of 100,000 lb. of beet occur in numbers in the French competitions, and the success depends entirely upon good culture and appropriate manuring. It thus appears that while under ordinary high farming we need 2,000,000 acres, or more, to keep 1,000,000 horned cattle, double that amount could be kept on one-half of that area; and if the density of population required it, the amount of cattle could be doubled again, and the area required to keep it might still be one-half, or even one-third of what it is now.[58]

French Gardening.—The above examples are striking enough, and yet those afforded by the market-gardening culture are still more striking. I mean the culture carried on in the neighbourhood of big cities, and more especially the culture maraîchère round Paris. In this culture each plant is treated according to its age. The seeds germinate and the seedlings develop their first four leaflets in especially favourable conditions of soil and temperature; then the best seedlings are picked out and transplanted into a bed of fine loam, under a frame or in the open air, where they freely develop their rootlets, and, gathered on a limited space, receive more than the usual care. Only after this preliminary training are they bedded in the open ground, where they grow till ripe. In such a culture the primitive condition of the soil is of little account, because loam is made out of the old forcing beds. The seeds are carefully tried, the seedlings receive proper attention, and there is no fear of drought, because of the variety of crops, the liberal watering with the help of a steam engine, and the stock of plants always kept ready to replace the weakest individuals. Almost each plant is treated individually.

There prevails, however, with regard to market-gardening, a misunderstanding which it would be well to remove. It is generally supposed that what chiefly attracts market-gardening to the great centres of population is the market. It must have been so; and so it may be still, but to some extent only. A great number of the Paris maraîchers, even of those who have their gardens within the walls of the city and whose main crop consists of vegetables in season, export the whole of their produce to England. What chiefly attracts the gardener to the great cities is stable manure; and this is not wanted so much for increasing the richness of the soil—one-tenth part of the manure used by the French gardeners would do for that purpose—but for keeping the soil at a certain temperature. Early vegetables pay best, and in order to obtain early produce not only the air but the soil as well must be warmed; and this is done by putting great quantities of properly mixed manure into the soil; its fermentation heats it. But it is evident that with the present development of industrial skill, the heating of the soil could be obtained more economically and more easily by hot-water pipes. Consequently, the French gardeners begin more and more to make use of portable pipes, or thermosiphons, provisionally established in the cool frames. This new improvement becomes of general use, and we have the authority of Barral’s Dictionnaire d’Agriculture to affirm that it gives excellent results. Under this system stable manure is used mainly for producing loam.[59]

As to the different degrees of fertility of the soil—always the stumbling-block of those who write about agriculture—the fact is that in market-gardening the soil is always made, whatever it originally may have been. Consequently—we are told by Prof. Dybowski, in the article “Maraîchers” in Barral’s Dictionnaire d’Agriculture—it is now a usual stipulation of the renting contracts of the Paris maraîchers that the gardener may carry away his soil, down to a certain depth, when he quits his tenancy. He himself makes it, and when he moves to another plot he carts his soil away, together with his frames, his water-pipes, and his other belongings.[60]

I could not relate here all the marvels achieved in market-gardening; so that I must refer the reader to works—most interesting works—especially devoted to the subject, and give only a few illustrations.[61] Let us take, for instance, the orchard—the marais—of M. Ponce, the author of a well-known work on the culture maraîchère. His orchard covered only two and seven-tenths acres. The outlay for the establishment, including a steam engine for watering purposes, reached £1,136. Eight persons, M. Ponce included, cultivated the orchard and carried the vegetables to the market, for which purpose one horse was kept; when returning from Paris they brought in manure, for which £100 was spent every year. Another £100 was spent in rent and taxes. But how to enumerate all that was gathered every year on this plot of less than three acres, without filling two pages or more with the most wonderful figures? One must read them in M. Ponce’s work, but here are the chief items: More than 20,000 lb. of carrots; more than 20,000 lb. of onions, radishes and other vegetables sold by weight; 6,000 heads of cabbage; 3,000 of cauliflower; 5,000 baskets of tomatoes; 5,000 dozen of choice fruit; and 154,000 heads of salad; in short, a total of 250,000 lb. of vegetables. The soil was made to such an amount out of forcing beds that every year 250 cubic yards of loam had to be sold. Similar examples could be given by the dozen, and the best evidence against any possible exaggeration of the results is the very high rent paid by the gardeners, which reaches in the suburbs of London from £10 to £15 per acre, and in the suburbs of Paris attains as much as £32 per acre. No less than 2,125 acres are cultivated round Paris in that way by 5,000 persons, and thus not only the 2,000,000 Parisians are supplied with vegetables, but the surplus is also sent to London.

The above results are obtained with the help of warm frames, thousands of glass bells, and so on. But even without such costly things, with only thirty-six yards of frames for seedlings, vegetables are grown in the open air to the value of £200 per acre.[62] It is obvious, however, that in such cases the high selling prices of the crops are not due to the high prices fetched by early vegetables in winter; they are entirely due to the high crops of the plainest ones.

Let me add also that all this wonderful culture has entirely developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before that, it was quite primitive. But now 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 frames and pépinières have made a real garden, a rich Southern garden, out of the suburbs of Paris. He has given to Paris the “two degrees less of latitude” after which a French scientific writer was longing; he supplies his city with mountains of grapes and fruit at any season; and in the early spring he inundates and perfumes it with flowers. But he does not only grow articles of luxury. The culture of plain vegetables on a large scale is spreading every year; and the results are so good that there are now practical maraîchers who venture to maintain that if all the food, animal and vegetable, necessary for 4,500,000 inhabitants of the departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise had to be grown on their own territory (3,250 square miles), it could be grown without resorting to any other methods of culture than those already in use—methods already tested on a large scale and proved to be successful.

And yet the Paris gardener is not our ideal of an agriculturist. In the painful work of civilisation he has shown us the way to follow; but the ideal of modern civilisation is elsewhere. He toils, with but a short interruption, from three in the morning till late in the night. He knows no leisure; he has no time to live the life of a human being; the commonwealth does not exist for him; his world is his garden, more than his family. He cannot be our ideal; neither he nor his system of agriculture. Our ambition is, that he should produce even more than he does with less labour, and should enjoy all the joys of human life. And this is fully possible.

As a matter of fact, if we put aside those gardeners who chiefly cultivate the so-called primeurs—strawberries ripened in January, and the like—if we take only those who grow their crops in the open field, and resort to frames exclusively for the earlier days of the life of the plant, and if we analyse their system, we see that its very essence is, first, to create for the plant a nutritive and porous soil, which contains both the necessary decaying organic matter and the inorganic compounds; and then to keep that soil and the surrounding atmosphere at a temperature and moisture superior to those of the open air. The whole system is summed up in these few words. If the French maraîcher spends prodigies of labour, intelligence, and imagination in combining different kinds of manure, so as to make them ferment at a given speed, he does so for no purpose but the above: a nourishing soil, and a desired equal temperature and moisture of the air and the soil. All his empirical art is devoted to the achievement of these two aims. But both can also be achieved in another and much easier way. The soil can be improved by hand, but it need not be made by hand. Any soil, of any desired composition, can be made by machinery. We already have manufactures of manure, engines for pulverising the phosphorites, and even the granites of the Vosges; and we shall see manufactures of loam as soon as there is a demand for them.

It is obvious that at present, when fraud and adulteration are exercised on such an immense scale in the manufacture of artificial manure, and the manufacture of manure is considered as a chemical process, while it ought to be considered as a physiological one, the gardener prefers to spend an unimaginable amount of labour rather than risk his crop by the use of a pompously labelled and unworthy drug. But that is a social obstacle which depends upon a want of knowledge and a bad social organisation, not upon physical causes.[63]

Of course, the necessity of creating for the earlier life of the plant a warm soil and atmosphere will always remain, and sixty years ago Léonce de Lavergne foretold that the next step in culture would be to warm the soil. But heating pipes give the same results as the fermenting manures at a much smaller expense of human labour. And already the system works on a large scale, as will be seen from the next chapter. Through it the productive powers of a given area of land are increased more than a hundred times.

It is obvious that now, when the capitalist system makes us pay for everything three or four times its labour value, we often spend about £1 for each square yard of a heated conservatory. But how many middlemen are making fortunes on the wooden sashes imported from Drontheim? If we only could reckon our expenses in labour, we should discover to our amazement that, thanks to the use of machinery, the square yard of a conservatory does not cost more than half a day of human labour; and we will see presently that the Jersey and Guernsey average for cultivating one acre under glass is only three men working ten hours a day. Therefore the conservatory, which formerly was a luxury, is rapidly entering into the domain of high culture. And we may foresee the day when the glass conservatory will be considered as a necessary appendix to the field, both for the growth of those fruits and vegetables which cannot succeed in the open air, and for the preliminary training of most cultural plants during the earlier stages of their life.

Home-grown fruit is always preferable to the half-ripe produce which is imported from abroad, and the additional work required for keeping a young plant under glass is largely repaid by the incomparable superiority of the crops. As to the question of labour, when we remember the incredible amount of labour which has been spent on the Rhine and in Switzerland for making the vineyards, their terraces, and stone walls, and for carrying the soil up the stony crags, as also the amount of labour which is spent every year for the culture of those vineyards and fruit gardens, we are inclined to ask, which of the two, all taken, requires less of human labour—a vinery (I mean the cold vinery) in a London suburb, or a vineyard on the Rhine, or on Lake Leman? And when we compare the prices realised by the grower of grapes round London (not those which are paid in the West-end fruit shops, but those received by the grower for his grapes in September and October) with those current in Switzerland or on the Rhine during the same months, we are inclined to maintain that nowhere in Europe, beyond the forty-fifth degree of latitude, are grapes grown at less expense of human labour, both for capital outlay and yearly work, than in the vineries of the London and Brussels suburbs.

At any rate, let us not overrate the productivity of the exporting countries, and let us remember that the vine-growers of Southern Europe drink themselves an abominable piquette; that Marseilles fabricates wine for home use out of dry raisins brought from Asia; and that the Normandy peasant who sends his apples to London, drinks real cider only on great festivities. Such a state of things will not last for ever; and the day is not far when we shall be compelled to look to our own resources to provide many of the things which we now import. And we shall not be the worse for that. The resources of science, both in enlarging the circle of our production and in new discoveries, are inexhaustible. And each new branch of activity calls into existence more and more new branches, which steadily increase the power of man over the forces of nature.

If we take all into consideration; if we realise the progress made of late in the gardening culture, and the tendency towards spreading its methods to the open field; if we watch the cultural experiments which are being made now—experiments to-day and realities to-morrow—and ponder over the resources kept in store by science, we are bound to say that it is utterly impossible to foresee at the present moment the limits as to the maximum number of human beings who could draw their means of subsistence from a given area of land, or as to what a variety of produce they could advantageously grow in any latitude. Each day widens former limits, and opens new and wide horizons. All we can say now is, that, even now, 600 persons could easily live on a square mile; and that, with cultural methods already used on a large scale, 1,000 human beings—not idlers—living on 1,000 acres could easily, without any kind of overwork, obtain from that area a luxurious vegetable and animal food, as well as the flax, wool, silk, and hides necessary for their clothing. As to what may be obtained under still more perfect methods—also known but not yet tested on a large scale—it is better to abstain from any forecast: so unexpected are the recent achievements of intensive culture.

We thus see that the over-population fallacy does not stand the very first attempt at submitting it to a closer examination. Those only can be horror-stricken at seeing the population of this country increase by one individual every 1,000 seconds who think of a human being as a mere claimant upon the stock of material wealth of mankind, without being at the same time a contributor to that stock. But we, who see in each new-born babe a future worker capable of producing much more than his own share of the common stock—we greet his appearance.

We know that a crowded population is a necessary condition for permitting man to increase the productive powers of his labour. We know that highly productive labour is impossible so long as men are scattered, few in numbers, over wide territories, and are thus unable to combine together for the higher achievements of civilisation. We know what an amount of labour must be spent to scratch the soil with a primitive plough, to spin and weave by hand; and we know also how much less labour it costs to grow the same amount of food and weave the same cloth with the help of modern machinery.

We also see that it is infinitely easier to grow 200,000 lb. of food on one acre than to grow them on ten acres. It is all very well to imagine that wheat grows by itself on the Russian steppes; but those who have seen how the peasant toils in the “fertile” black earth region will have one desire: that the increase of population may permit the use of the steam-digger and gardening culture in the steppes; that it may permit those who are now the beasts of burden of humanity to raise their backs and to become at last men.

We must, however, recognise that there are a few economists fully aware of the above truths. They gladly admit that Western Europe could grow much more food than it does; but they see no necessity nor advantage in doing so, as long as there are nations which can supply food in exchange for manufactured goods. Let us then examine how far this view is correct.

It is obvious that if we are satisfied with merely stating that it is cheaper to bring wheat from Riga than to grow it in Lincolnshire, the whole question is settled in a moment. But is it so in reality? Is it really cheaper to have food from abroad? And, supposing it is, are we not yet bound to analyse that compound result which we call price, rather than to accept it as a supreme and blind ruler of our actions?

We know, for instance, how French agriculture is burdened by taxation. And yet, if we compare the prices of articles of food in France, which herself grows most of them, with the prices in this country, which imports them, we find no difference in favour of the importing country. On the contrary, the balance is rather in favour of France, and it decidedly was so for wheat until the new protective tariff was introduced. As soon as one goes out of Paris, one finds that every home produce is cheaper in France than it is in England, and that the prices decrease further when we go farther East on the Continent.

There is another feature still more unfavourable for this country: namely, the enormous development of the class of middlemen who stand between the importer and the home producer on the one side and the consumer on the other. We have lately heard a good deal about the quite disproportionate part of the prices we pay which goes into the middleman’s pockets. We have all heard of the East-end clergyman who was compelled to become butcher in order to save his parishioners from the greedy middleman. We read in the papers that many farmers of the midland counties do not realise more than 9d. for a pound of butter, while the customer pays from 1s. 6d. to 1s. 8d.; and that from 1½d. to 2d. for the quart of milk is all that the Cheshire farmers can get, while we pay 4d. for the adulterated, and 5d. for the unadulterated milk. An analysis of the Covent Garden prices and a comparison of the same with retail prices, which is being made from time to time in the daily papers, proves that the customer pays for vegetables at the rate of 6d. to 1s., and sometimes more, for each penny realised by the grower. But in a country of imported food it must be so: the grower who himself sells his own produce disappears from its markets, and in his place appears the middleman.[64] If we move, however, towards the East, and go to Belgium, Germany, and Russia, we find that the cost of living is more and more reduced, so that finally we find that in Russia, which remains still agricultural, wheat costs one-half or two-thirds of its London prices, and meat is sold throughout the provinces at about ten farthings (kopecks) the pound. And we may therefore hold that it is not yet proved at all that it is cheaper to live on imported food than to grow it ourselves.

But if we analyse price, and make a distinction between its different elements, the disadvantage becomes still more apparent. If we compare, for instance, the costs of growing wheat in this country and in Russia, we are told that in the United Kingdom the hundredweight of wheat cannot be grown at less than 8s. 7d.; while in Russia the costs of production of the same hundredweight are estimated at from 3s. 6d. to 4s. 9d.[65] The difference is enormous, and it would still remain very great even if we admit that there is some exaggeration in the former figure. But why this difference? Are the Russian labourers paid so much less for their work? Their money wages surely are much lower, but the difference is equalised as soon as we reckon their wages in produce. The twelve shillings a week of the British agricultural labourer represents the same amount of wheat in Britain as the six shillings a week of the Russian labourer represents in Russia. As to the supposed prodigious fertility of the soil in the Russian prairies, it is a fallacy. Crops of from sixteen to twenty-three bushels per acre are considered good crops in Russia, while the average hardly reaches thirteen bushels, even in the corn-exporting parts of the empire. Besides, the amount of labour which is necessary to grow wheat in Russia with no thrashing-machines, with a plough dragged by a horse hardly worth the name, with no roads for transport, and so on, is certainly much greater than the amount of labour which is necessary to grow the same amount of wheat in Western Europe.

When brought to the London market, Russian wheat was sold in 1887 at 31s. the quarter, while it appeared from the same Mark Lane Express figures that the quarter of wheat could not be grown in this country at less than 36s. 8d., even if the straw be sold, which is not always the case. But the difference of the land rent in both countries would alone account for the difference of prices. In the wheat belt of Russia, where the average rent stood at about 12s. per acre, and the crop was from fifteen to twenty bushels, the rent amounted to from 3s. 6d. to 5s. 8d. in the costs of production of each quarter of Russian wheat; while in this country, where the rent and taxes are valued (in the Mark Lane Express figures) at no less than 40s. per each wheat-growing acre, and the crop is taken at thirty bushels, the rent amounts to 10s. in the costs of production of each quarter.[66] But even if we take only 30s. per acre of rent and taxes, and an average crop of twenty-eight bushels, we still have 8s. 8d. out of the sale price of each quarter of wheat, which goes to the landlord and the State. If it costs so much more in money to grow wheat in this country, while the amount of labour is so much less in this country than in Russia, it is due to the very great height of the land rents attained during the years 1860-1880. But this growth itself was due to the facilities for realising large profits on the sale of manufactured goods abroad. The false condition of British rural economy, not the infertility of the soil, is thus the chief cause of the Russian competition.

Twenty-five years have passed since I wrote these lines—the agricultural crisis provoked by the competition of cheap American wheat being at that time at its climax, and, I am sorry to say, I must leave these lines such as they were written. I do not mean, of course, that no adaptation to the new conditions created by the fall in the prices of wheat should have taken place during the last quarter of a century, in the sense of a more intensive culture and a better utilisation of the land. On the contrary, I mention in different parts of this book the progress accomplished of late in the development of separate branches of intensive culture, such as fruit-culture, market-gardening, culture under glass, French gardening, and poultry farming, and I also indicate the different steps taken to promote further improvements, such as better conditions of transport, co-operation among the farmers, and especially the development of small holdings.

However, after having taken into account all these improvements, one cannot but see with regret that the same regressive movement in British agriculture, which began in the ’seventies, continues still; and while more and more of the land that was once under the plough goes out of culture, no corresponding increase in the quantities of live stock is to be seen. And if we consult the mass of books and review articles which have been dealing lately with this subject, we see that all the writers recognise that British agriculture must adapt itself to the new conditions by a thorough reform of its general character; and yet the same writers recognise that only a few steps were taken till now in the proper direction, and none of them was taken with a sufficient energy. Society at large remains indifferent to the needs of British agriculture.

It must not be forgotten that the competition of American wheat has made the same havoc in the agriculture of most European countries—especially in France and Belgium; but in the last two countries the adaptations which were necessary to resist the effects of the competition have already taken place to a great extent. Both in Belgium and in France the American imports gave a new impetus toward a more intensive utilisation of the soil, and this impetus was strongest in Belgium, where no attempt was made to protect agriculture by an increase of the import duties, as was the case in France. On the contrary, the duties upon imported wheat were abolished in Belgium precisely at the time when the American competition began to be felt—that is, between 1870 and 1880.

It was not only in England that the fall in the prices of wheat was felt acutely by the farmers. In France, the hectolitre of wheat (very nearly three bushels), which was sold at 18s. 10d. in 1871-1875, fell to 15s. 5d. in 1881-1885, and to 12s. 6d. in 1893; and the same must have been in Belgium, the more so as the protective duties were abolished. But here is what Mr. Seebohm Rowntree says about the effect of the prices in his admirable book on land and labour in Belgium:—

“For a time the Belgian agriculturist was hardly hit, but gradually he adjusted himself to the new conditions. His cultivation became more intensive, he made more and more use of co-operation in various directions, and he devoted himself to new branches of agriculture, especially the raising of live stock and garden produce. He began to realise the value of artificial manures, and to acknowledge that science could help him.”—Land and Labour, p. 147.

These words by Mr. Rowntree are fully confirmed by the change in the general aspects of the Belgian agriculture, as they appear from the official statistical data. The same must be said of France. The above-mentioned fall in prices induced agriculturists to intensify their methods of culture. I have mentioned already the rapid spreading of agricultural machinery among the French peasants during the last twenty years; and I must mention also the equally remarkable increase in the amounts of chemical manure used by the peasants; the sudden development of agricultural syndicates since 1884; the extension taken by co-operation; the new organisation of transport with cool storage, or in heated cars, for the export of fruit and flowers; the development taken by special industrial cultures; and still more so the immense development of gardening in the South of France and market-gardening in the North. All these adaptations were introduced on such a scale that one is bound to recognise that the crisis has had the effect of giving quite a new aspect to French agriculture, taken as a whole.

Much more ought to be said with regard to the American competition, and therefore I must refer the reader to the remarkable series of articles dealing with the whole of the subject which Schaeffle published in 1886 in the Zeitschrift für die gesammte Staatswissenschaft, and to the most elaborate article on the costs of growing wheat all over the world which appeared in April, 1887, in the Quarterly Review. These articles were written at the time when American competition was something new and made much havoc in English agriculture, causing a fall of from 30 to 50 per cent. in the rents of land for agricultural purposes. But the conclusions of these two writers were fully corroborated by the yearly reports of the American Board of Agriculture, and Schaeffle’s previsions were fully confirmed by the subsequent reports of Mr. J. R. Dodge. It appeared from these works that the fertility of the American soil had been grossly exaggerated, as the masses of wheat which America sent to Europe from its north-western farms were grown on a soil the natural fertility of which is not higher, and often lower, than the average fertility of the unmanured European soil. The Casselton farm in Dakota, with its twenty bushels per acre, was an exception; while the average crop of the chief wheat-growing States in the West was only eleven to twelve bushels. In order to find a fertile soil in America, and crops of from thirty to forty bushels, one must go to the old Eastern States, where the soil is made by man’s hands.[67]

The same applies to the American supplies of meat. Schaeffle pointed out that the great mass of live stock which appeared in the census of cattle in the States was not reared in the prairies, but in the stables of the farms, in the same way as in Europe; as to the prairies, he found on them only one-eleventh part of the American horned cattle, one-fifth of the sheep and one-twenty-first of the pigs.[68] “Natural fertility” being thus out of question, we must look for social causes; and we have them, for the Western States, in the cheapness of land and a proper organisation of production; and for the Eastern States in the rapid progress of intensive high farming.

It is evident that the methods of culture must vary according to different conditions. In the vast prairies of North America, where land could be bought from 8s. to 40s. the acre, and where spaces of from 100 to 150 square miles in one block could be given to wheat culture, special methods of culture were applied and the results were excellent. Land was bought—not rented. In the autumn, whole studs of horses were brought, and the tilling and sowing were done with the aid of formidable ploughs and sowing machines. Then the horses were sent to graze in the mountains; the men were dismissed, and one man, occasionally two or three, remained to winter on the farm. In the spring the owners’ agents began to beat the inns for hundreds of miles round, and engaged labourers and tramps, both freely supplied by Europe, for the crop. Battalions of men were marched to the wheat fields, and were camped there; the horses were brought from the mountains, and in a week or two the crop was cut, thrashed, winnowed, put in sacks, by specially invented machines, and sent to the next elevator, or directly to the ships which carried it to Europe. Whereupon the men were disbanded again, the horses were sent back to the grazing grounds, or sold, and again only a couple of men remained on the farm.

The crop from each acre was small, but the machinery was so perfected that in this way 300 days of one man’s labour produced from 200 to 300 quarters of wheat; in other words—the area of land being of no account—every man produced in one day his yearly bread food (eight and a half bushels of wheat); and taking into account all subsequent labour, it was calculated that the work of 300 men in one single day delivered to the consumer at Chicago the flour that is required for the yearly food of 250 persons. Twelve hours and a half of work are thus required in Chicago to supply one man with his yearly provision of wheat-flour.

Under the special conditions offered in the Far West this certainly was an appropriate method for increasing all of a sudden the wheat supplies of mankind. It answered its purpose when large territories of unoccupied land were opened to enterprise. But it could not answer for ever. Under such a system of culture the soil was soon exhausted, the crop declined, and intensive agriculture (which aims at high crops on a limited area) had soon to be resorted to. Such was the case in Iowa in the year 1878. Up till then, Iowa was an emporium for wheat-growing on the lines just indicated. But the soil was already exhausted, and when a disease came the wheat plants had no force to resist it. In a few weeks nearly all the wheat crop, which was expected to beat all previous records, was lost; eight to ten bushels per acre of bad wheat were all that could be cropped. The result was that “mammoth farms” had to be broken up into small farms, and that the Iowa farmers (after a terrible crisis of short duration—everything is rapid in America) took to a more intensive culture. Now, they are not behind France in wheat culture, as they already grow an average of sixteen and a half bushels per acre on an area of more than 2,000,000 acres, and they will soon win ground. Somehow, with the aid of manure and improved methods of farming, they compete admirably with the mammoth farms of the Far West.

In fact, over and over again it was pointed out, by Schaeffle, Semler, Oetken, and many other writers, that the force of “American competition” is not in its mammoth farms, but in the countless small farms upon which wheat is grown in the same way as it is grown in Europe—that is, with manuring—but with a better organised production and facilities for sale, and without being compelled to pay to the landlord a toll of one-third part, or more, of the selling price of each quarter of wheat. However, it was only after I had myself made a tour in the prairies of Manitoba in 1897, and those of Ohio in 1901, that I could realise the full truth of the just-mentioned views. The 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 bushels of wheat, which are exported every year from Manitoba, are grown almost entirely in farms of one or two “quarter-sections”—that is, of 160 and 320 acres. The ploughing is made in the usual way, and in an immense majority of cases the farmers buy the reaping and binding machines (the “binders”) by associating in groups of four. The thrashing machine is rented by the farmer for one or two days, and the farmer carts his wheat to the elevator with his own horses, either to sell it immediately, or to keep it at the elevator if he is in no immediate need of money and hopes to get a higher price in one month or two. In short, in Manitoba one is especially struck with the fact that, even under a system of keen competition, the middle-size farm has completely beaten the old mammoth farm, and that it is not manufacturing wheat on a grand scale which pays best. It is also most interesting to note that thousands and thousands of farmers produce mountains of wheat in the Canadian province of Toronto and in the Eastern States, although the land is not prairie-land at all, and the farms are, as a rule, small.

The force of “American competition” is thus not in the possibility of having hundreds of acres of wheat in one block. It lies in the ownership of the land, in a system of culture which is appropriate to the character of the country, in a widely developed spirit of association, and, finally, in a number of institutions and customs intended to lift the agriculturist and his profession to a high level which is unknown in Europe.

In Europe we do not realise at all what is done in the States and Canada in the interests of agriculture. In every American State, and in every distinct region of Canada, there is an experimental farm, and all the work of preliminary experiment upon new varieties of wheat, oats, barley, fodder and fruit, which the farmer has mostly to make himself in Europe, is made under the best scientific conditions at the experimental farms, on a small scale first and on a large scale next. The results of all these researches and experiments are not merely rendered accessible to the farmer who would like to know them, but they are brought to his knowledge, and, so to speak, are forced upon his attention by every possible means. The “Bulletins” of the experimental stations are distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies; visits to the farms are organised in such a way that thousands of farmers should inspect the stations every year, and be shown by specialists the results obtained, either with new varieties of plants or under various new methods of treatment. Correspondence is carried on with the farmers on such a scale that, for instance, at Ottawa, the experimental farm sends out every year a hundred thousand letters and packets. Every farmer can get, free of charge and postage, five pounds of seed of any variety of cereals, out of which he can get next year the necessary seed for sowing several acres. And, finally, in every small and remote township there are held farmers’ meetings, at which special lecturers, who are sent out by the experimental farms or the local agricultural societies, discuss with the farmers in an informal way the results of last year’s experiments and discoveries relative to every branch of agriculture, horticulture, cattle-breeding, dairying and agricultural co-operation.[69]

American agriculture really offers an imposing sight—not in the wheat fields of the Far West, which soon will become a thing of the past, but in the development of rational agriculture and the forces which promote it. Read the description of an agricultural exhibition, “the State’s fair,” in some small town of Iowa, with its 70,000 farmers camping with their families in tents during the fair’s week, studying, learning, buying, and selling, and enjoying life. You see a national fête, and you feel that you deal with a nation in which agriculture is in respect. Or read the publications of the scores of experimental stations, whose reports are distributed broadcast over the country, and are read by the farmers and discussed at countless “farmers’ meetings.” Consult the “Transactions” and “Bulletins” of the countless agricultural societies, not royal but popular; study the grand enterprises for irrigation; and you will feel that American agriculture is a real force, imbued with life, which no longer fears mammoth farms, and needs not to cry like a child for protection.

“Intensive” agriculture and gardening are already by this time as much a feature of the treatment of the soil in America as they are in Belgium. As far back as the year 1880, nine States, among which were Georgia, Virginia and the two Carolinas, bought £5,750,000 worth of artificial manure; and we are told that by this time the use of artificial manure has immensely spread towards the West. In Iowa, where mammoth farms used to exist twenty years ago, sown grass is already in use, and it is highly recommended by both the Iowa Agricultural Institute and the numerous local agricultural papers; while at the agricultural competitions the highest rewards are given, not for extensive farming, but for high crops on small areas. Thus, 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. This shows where the ambition of the Iowa farmer goes. In Minnesota, prizes were given already for crops of 300 to 1,120 bushels of potatoes to the acre—that is, from eight and a quarter to thirty-one tons to the acre—while the average potato crop in Great Britain is only six tons.

At the same time market-gardening is immensely extending in America. In the market-gardens of Florida we see such crops as 445 to 600 bushels of onions per acre, 400 bushels of tomatoes, 700 bushels of sweet potatoes, which testify to a high development of culture. As to the “truck farms” (market-gardening for export by steamer and rail), they covered, in 1892, 400,000 acres, and the fruit farms in the suburbs of Norfolk, in Virginia, were described by Prof. Ch. Baltet[70] as real models of that sort of culture—a very high testimony in the mouth of a French gardener who himself comes from the model marais of Troyes.

And while people in London continue to pay almost all the year round twopence for a lettuce (very often imported from Paris), they have at Chicago and Boston those unique establishments in the world where lettuces are grown in immense greenhouses with the aid of electric light; and we must not forget that although the discovery of “electric” growth is European (it is due to Siemens), it was at the Cornell University that it was proved by a series of experiments that electric light is an admirable aid for forwarding the growth of the green parts of the plant.

In short, America, which formerly took the lead in bringing “extensive” agriculture to perfection, now takes the lead in “intensive,” or forced, agriculture as well. In this adaptability lies the real force of American competition.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] I leave these lines on purpose as they were written for the first edition of this book.

[35] Twenty-three per cent. of the total area of England, 40 per cent. in Wales, and 75 per cent. in Scotland are now under wood, coppice, mountain heath, water, etc. The remainder—that is, 32,777,513 acres—which were under culture and permanent pasture in the year 1890 (only 32,094,658 in 1911), may be taken as the “cultivable” area of Great Britain.

[36] Average area under wheat in 1853-1860, 4,092,160 acres; average crop, 14,310,779 quarters. Average area under wheat in 1884-1887, 2,509,055 acres; average crop (good years), 9,198,956 quarters. See Professor W. Fream’s Rothamstead Experiments (London, 1888), page 83. I take in the above Sir John Lawes’ figure of 5·65 bushels per head of population every year. It is very close to the yearly allowance of 5·67 bushels of the French statisticians. The Russian statisticians reckon 5·67 bushels of winter crops (chiefly rye) and 2·5 bushels of spring crops (sarrazin, barley, etc.).

[37] There was an increase of 1,800,000 head of horned cattle, and a decrease of 4¼ million sheep (6⅔ millions, if we compare the year 1886 with 1868), which would correspond to an increase of 1¼ million of units of cattle, because eight sheep are reckoned as equivalent to one head of horned cattle. But five million acres having been reclaimed upon waste land since 1860, the above increase should hardly do for covering that area, so that the 2¼ million acres which were cultivated no longer remained fully uncovered. They were a pure loss to the nation.

[38] According to a report read by Mr. Crawford before the Statistical Society in October, 1899, Britain imports every year 4,500,000 tons of hay and other food for its cattle and horses. Under the present system of culture, 6,000,000 acres could produce these food-stuffs. If another 6,000,000 acres were sown with cereals, all the wheat required for the United Kingdom could have been produced at home with the methods of culture now in use.

[39] No less than 5,877,000 cwts. of beef and mutton, 1,065,470 sheep and lambs, and 415,565 pieces of cattle were imported in 1895. In 1910 the first of these figures rose to 13,690,000 cwts. Altogether, it is calculated (Statesman’s Year-book, 1912) that, in 1910, 21 lb. of imported beef, 13½ lb. of imported mutton, and 7 lb. of other sorts of meat, per head of population, were retained for home consumption; in addition to 11 lb. of butter, 262 lb. of wheat, 25 lb. of flour, and 20 lb. of rice and rice-flour, imported.

[40] Agricultural population (farmers and labourers) in England and Wales: 2,100,000 in 1861; 1,383,000 in 1884; 1,311,720 in 1891; 1,152,500 (including fishing population) in 1901.

[41] Round the small hamlet where I stayed for two summers, there were: One farm, 370 acres, four labourers and two boys; another, about 300 acres, two men and two boys; a third, 800 acres, five men only and probably as many boys. In truth, the problem of cultivating the land with the least number of men has been solved in this spot by not cultivating at all as much as two-thirds of it. Since these lines were written, in 1890, a movement in favour of intensive market-gardening has begun in this country, and I read in November, 1909, that they were selling at the Covent Garden market asparagus that had been grown in South Devon in November. They begin also to grow early potatoes in Cornwall and Devon. Formerly, nobody thought of utilising this rich soil and warm climate for growing early vegetables.

[42] Land Problems and National Welfare, London, 1911.

[43] Rural England, two big volumes, London, 1902.

[44] See H. Rider Haggard’s Rural Denmark and its Lessons, London, 1911, pp. 188-212.

[45] The Rothamstead Experiments, 1888, by Professor W. Fream, p. 35 seq. It is well worth noting that Mr. Hall, who was the head of Rothamstead for many years, maintained from his own experience that growing wheat in England is more profitable than rearing live stock. The same opinion was often expressed by the experts whose testimonies are reproduced by Rider Haggard. In many places of his Rural England one finds also a mention of high wheat crops, up to fifty-six bushels per acre, obtained in many places in this country.