SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY 255 



are doubtless numerous causes, but there is probably none more potent 

 than the phenomenal growth of science in the past hundred years. If 

 we are about to have a new democracy it is because science with a thou- 

 sand charges has shattered old ideas and institutions into fragments 

 and given in their stead the materials for new constructions. 



Primary in this relation of science to democracy is the change which 

 has been wrought in the economic status of the men who work with 

 their hands. As not before in the history of mankind, laborers may 

 have food, they may have schools, they may travel and wear good clothes ; 

 they may have household conveniences, baths and lighted rooms, un- 

 known to kings and nobles of a century ago. In fifty years our civiliza- 

 tion has changed from one of deficit to one of surplus and the specter 

 of a near world famine has disappeared. 



For a hundred years following 1798, men were taught that their 

 welfare depended upon the limitation of the population. Malthus had 

 pointed out that the produce of the world could be made to increase 

 in but an arithmetical ratio, while the unrestrained human race was 

 enlarging in a geometrical ratio. The economic deficit which the world 

 faced at the beginning of the nineteenth century could on this theory 

 only become greater and greater until the whole race of men would be 

 struggling for the insufficient fruits of a niggard earth. But in the 

 very hour when Malthus and John Stuart Mill were most orthodox the 

 theory was being already discredited by a change in the world's produc- 

 tion. From an earth which gave too little for the sustenance of her 

 children we have come to a condition where men live in the midst of 

 abundance. We are not so much troubled now by the scarcity of food 

 as by its inadequate distribution. " For the first time in the history of 

 civilization" writes Prince Kropotkin, "mankind has reached a point 

 where the means of satisfying its needs are in excess of the needs them- 

 selves." 



For untold generations, slaves and peasants and farmers had gotten 

 with pain the barest subsistence from the soil, but, suddenly, as if by 

 magic, two blades of grass began to grow where one had grown before 

 and an acre which had yielded thirty bushels of corn began to give fifty 

 and sixty and a hundred. The area for the cultivation of foods was 

 widely extended by the development of the American continent and 

 exploration and colonization in South America and Africa. New 

 articles of food came into existence. Beets, hitherto but a food for 

 cattle, began to give sugar, and tropical fruits, especially the banana, 

 found their way to every market in the world. The tomato, long sus- 

 pected of being poisonous and, down to the middle of the nineteenth 

 century, distrusted as a possible forerunner of cancer, has become a food 

 staple. The potato, unknown before the sixteenth century and at the 

 beginning of the eighteenth regarded as a fit food only for swine and 



