92 THE POSSIBILITIES 



don, 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 2,000 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 5 " 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 Ire- 

 land, 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. 



