5o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



suggested by Euskin. Suppose that five men were to take a tract of a 

 thousand acres for the purpose of running a general farm. Learned in 

 the art of scientific agriculture, these men provide the necessary tools, 

 equipment, fertilizers and seeds, prepare the ground, sow the crops, har- 

 vest the grain, potatoes, fruit and vegetables, and take them to market. 

 Where they find their land too wet, they drain it ; if, perchance, the tract 

 is too dry, they irrigate; and if a test shows that a certain field needs 

 lime, they promptly apply lime. These men are farming the land. 

 They do not wait for the land to produce a living for them, but instead, 

 they use the land in every conceivable way. 



Suppose that, instead of fertilizing, irrigating and draining, these 

 men upon discovering that one plot was very fertile, farmed only that 

 plot, leaving the less fertile parts of the farm untilled; suppose that, 

 when water stood in a field, they invoked the aid of physics and mathe- 

 matics, ascertained that this field was low, and therefore bound to be 

 wet; suppose that they abandoned a hill plot which would not raise to- 

 bacco without even attempting to ascertain whether it would grow 

 buckwheat; suppose that after venturing timidly to try a few minor ex- 

 periments, these men, discouraged and forlorn, should assemble around 

 a stone, and, raising their hands to the sky, should beseech some higher 

 power to make water run up-hill or tobacco grow on buckwheat land. 

 Or, instead of praying, imagine their hopeless, hang-dog air as they 

 gazed dejectedly over their thousand acres, exclaiming: "Alas, the law 

 of gravitation makes our low land wet; tobacco will not grow on the 

 highland; yonder field contains no lime for our clover crop; and even 

 the cattle in the hill pasture suffer from lack of water." 



What a picture ! You sneer, contemptuously. " What sane man 

 would talk so ? " you demand. " The illustration approaches the ridic- 

 ulous. Beseech a higher power? Bemoan the law of gravitation? 

 Fiddlesticks ! Irrigate, drain, lime, water, fertilize, and the land will 

 bring forth in abundance." 



True, true, but listen ! Ninety million people, some of them intelli- 

 gent men and women, living in one of the most fertile regions of the 

 whole earth, possessed of boundless natural resources, of knowledge 

 and of energy, have suffered for a century from devastating industrial 

 depressions; have watched little children work their fingers raw in the 

 coal breakers; have witnessed an exploitation of women that has re- 

 quired two hundred thousand of them to sell their bodies; have tol- 

 erated sodden misery, poverty, vice, criminality; have permitted one 

 small group in the community to possess itself of the natural resources 

 on which all depend, and to exact a monopoly price, from all, for the 

 use of those resources ; and now, after generations of this gruesome mo- 

 tion picture, these sane, strong men and women raise their hands to a 

 higher power, or slink dejectedly into their caricature homes, making 



