2 THREE ACRES AND LIBERTY 



It is not the growth of the cities that we want to check, 

 but the needless want and misery in the cities, and this can 

 be done by restoring the natural condition of living, and 

 among other things, by showing that it is easier and making 

 it more attractive to live in comfort on the outskirts of the 

 city as producers, than in the slums as paupers. 



We know already that the natural and healthy life is, that 

 in the sweat of our faces we should eat bread. We observe 

 that everything we eat or use or make comes from the earth 

 by labor; but no one knows how abundantly the Mother 

 can supply her children. It is well said that no man yet 

 knows the capacity of a square yard of earth. 



The farmer thinks that he has done well if he gets a hun- 

 ; dred and fifty or two hundred bushels of potatoes from an 

 1 acre ; he does not know that others have gotten 1284 bushels. 1 



Let us realize what an acre means. An acre is a square 

 about 209 feet each way, 4840 square yards of land. A 

 New York City avenue block is about 200 feet long from 

 house corner to house corner. It has eight city lots 25 X 

 100 in its front ; about double that space (17f lots) makes 

 an acre. 



An ordinary one-horse cart holds twenty bushels, so then 

 a full crop of potatoes from that space would fill 56 carts. 



To raise potatoes as an ordinary farmer raises them, re- 

 quires him to go over the ground not less than a dozen times, 

 plowing, harrowing, marking, planting, cultivating, three 



1 "Mr. Knight, whose name is well known to every horticulturist 

 in England, once dug out of his fields no less than 1284 bushels of 

 potatoes, or thirty-four tons and nine hundreds weight (about 34 

 bushels to the ton), on a single acre; and at a recent competition 

 in Minnesota, 1120 bushels, or thirty tons, could be ascertained as 

 having been grown on one acre." (P. Kropotkin's "Fields, Fac- 

 tories and Workshops," page 114.) 



