CONCLUSION. 215 



to convey during the next four or five years a reasoned, 

 scientific knowledge of Nature's laws, as well as a 

 knowledge, at once reasoned and practical, of the tech- 

 nical methods of satisfying man's material needs. Far 

 from being inferior to the " specialised " young persons 

 manufactured by our universities, the complete human 

 being, trained to use his brain and his hands, excels 

 f .hem, on the contrary, in all respects, especially as an 

 initiator and an inventor in both science and technics. 



All this has been proved. It is an acquisition of 

 the times we live in an acquisition which has been won 

 despite the innumerable obstacles always thrown in the 

 way of every initiative mind. It has been won by the 

 obscure tillers of the soil, from whose hands greedy 

 States, landlords and middlemen snatch the fruit of 

 their labour even before it is ripe ; by obscure teachers 

 who only too often fall crushed under the weight of 

 Church, State, commercial competition, inertia of mind 

 and prejudice. 



And now, in the presence of all these conquests 

 what is the reality of things ? 



Nine-tenths of the whole population of grain-export- 

 ing countries like Russia, one-half of it in countries like 

 France which live on home-grown food, work upon the 

 land most of them in the same way as the slaves of 

 antiquity did, only to obtain a meagre crop from a soil, 

 and with a machinery which they cannot improve, be- 

 cause taxation, rent and usury keep them always as near 

 as possible at the margin of starvation. At the begin- 

 ning of this century, whole populations plough with the 

 same plough as their mediaeval ancestors, live in the same 

 incertitude of the morrow, and are as -carefully denied 

 education ; and they have, in claiming their portion of 

 bread, to march with their children and wives against 

 their own sons' bayonets, as their grandfathers did a 

 hundred and three hundred years ago. 



In industrially developed countries, a couple of months' 



