252 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



trades. They sometimes have a little extra time mornings, even- 

 ings, and holidays, which might be spent in their own gardens, 

 if they had gardens, to better advantage than it is now spent. 

 Besides, their children would undoubtedly profit greatly from 

 having some productive work to do during a part of the time 

 outside of school hours. The chief difficulty in the way of 

 the extension of this kind of small farming is the lack of 

 adequate transportation facilities. Even with adequate transpor- 

 tation facilities, however, only a small percentage of the people 

 would really gain anything from this source, because of the lack 

 of the mental and more particularly the moral qualities neces- 

 sary to make a good farmer or gardener. But out of the millions 

 of laboring people in our cities there would doubtless be many 

 thousands who would find this kind of farming a great help in 

 getting a living for their families, if land were to be had in 

 small parcels and if transportation facilities were sufficiently de- 

 veloped to enable them to get to and from their work conven- 

 iently. If one laborer's family in a hundred, or even one in a 

 thousand, were materially benefited in this way, it would be well 

 worth accomplishing. But this type of farming usually reaches 

 a higher development in countries where trades are overcrowded 

 and wages low, than where the demand for labor is fairly good 

 and wages are fairly high. Under these conditions a larger num- 

 ber are driven by necessity to supplement their regular earnings 

 by work in their gardens, utilizing their spare moments and the 

 surplus labor power of their families. But even in a country 

 where wages are relatively high, a wider diffusion of the knowl- 

 edge of the gardener's art would undoubtedly result in a much 

 wider application of that art by wage workers and their families. 

 Gardens of this description, sometimes called homecrofters' 

 gardens by English-speaking people, have become prominent 

 features of the environs of European cities such as Paris, Lon- 

 don, and Berlin. They have had their highest development in 



