8 WAGES AND EMPIRE 



offerings of nature. Those who exist solely by hunting, 

 fishing, and consuming wild vegetable growths must 

 be sought in the Arctics, in Southern Asia, in the 

 fastnesses of Africa, in the unexplored parts of Australia, 

 and in the wilds of South America. They will be 

 found few in numbers, and are the only people who do 

 not make their food. 



Not to be confused with them are other races 

 described also as ' uncivilised ' and ' savages,' but 

 possessing in some degree the arts of vegetable and 

 animal culture. To this class belong tribes in the 

 northern and central parts of Asia and nearly all the 

 inhabitants of the tropical parts ■ of Africa. Their 

 place, however, in an economic enumeration is with 

 civilisation and not with the savage state. 



An enumeration of the food of the inhabitants of 

 Europe makes it clear that their nutriment is what 

 they themselves cause to come into being and quite 

 other, as it is indeed extraordinarily greater in quantity, 

 than what was the natural occurrence of food. There 

 are in Europe to-day two hunched million sheep, a 

 hundred million cattle, fifty million pigs, and forty 

 million horses. Of the land a million square mUes is 

 cleared of its natural grow^ths and made to bear human 

 food : corn, potatoes, vines, sugar-beet, vegetables, fruit, 

 and so on, with the result that four hundred million 

 people can live where in a state of nature a hundredth 

 part of that number would have had the greatest 

 difficulty in finding enough to subsist upon. 



Other parts of the world witness the same facts. 

 In the North American Continent a hundred million 

 of the human race subsist on made food, and live very 

 well. The wild food supplied by this area sustained 

 at most three million Red Indians, who eked out the 

 scanty supplies with a rudimentary agriculture and 

 were underfed in comparison with the present inhabi- 

 tants. In South America laige numbers of the race 



