130 THE POSSIBILITIES 



given to Paris the " two degrees less of latitude " 

 after which a French scientific writer was 

 longing ; he supplies hia city with mountains 

 of grapes and fruit at any season ; and in the 

 early spring he inundates and perfumes it 

 with flowers. But he does not only grow articles 

 of luxury. The culture of plain vegetables on 

 a large scale is spreading every year ; and the 

 results are so good that there are now practical 

 maraichers who venture to maintain that if all 

 the food, animal and vegetable, necessary for 

 4,500,000 inhabitants of the departments of 

 Seine and Seine-et-Oise had to be grown on 

 their own territory (3,250 square miles), it 

 could be grown without resorting to any other 

 methods of culture than those already in use 

 methods already tested on a large scale and 

 proved to be successful. 



And yet the Paris gardener is not our ideal 

 of an agriculturist. In the painful work of 

 civilisation he has shown us the way to follow ; 

 but the ideal of modern civilisation is else- 

 where. He toils, with but a short interrup- 

 tion, from three in the morning till late in the 

 night. He knows no leisure ; he has no time 

 to live the life of a human being ; the common- 

 wealth does not exist for him ; his world is 

 his garden, more than his family. He cannot 



