48 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



and three hundred thousand human beings cannot pro- 

 ductively cultivate an area of 33,000,000 acres unless 

 they can resort to the Bonanza farm's methods of cul- 

 ture. 



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 2000 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 



