378 NATURAL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS VIII 



any but a popular sense, the proposition is untrue. 

 In a strictly scientific sense, the soil is no more 

 a producer than air and water and sunshine are ; 

 indeed, is altogether less important than they as 

 a condition of production. For food-plants, which 

 are the producers and the only producers of food- 

 stuffs properly so called, could not possibly get on 

 without air, water, and sunshine, though they 

 might do without soil. It would be possible to 

 grow a crop of food-plants, no part of which had 

 ever been in contact with the soil. On the other 

 hand, the richest of soils may be as barren as the 

 desert in regard to economic production for the 

 simple reason that it is occupied by a luxuriant 

 growth of plants that are not producers of food- 

 stuffs adapted to human needs. 



The " gratuitous offering of Nature " in the 

 shape of a hundred acres of tropical forest would 

 be of not much more use to a savage than the 

 like area of a gorse common. 



We have all this time been occupied with the 

 eleven pages not very large pages either which 

 make up the first chapter of the seventh book of 

 " Progress and Poverty " ; but there are more 

 fallacies than pages, and I have not yet done with 

 them. Indeed, like a careful entertainer, I have 

 saved some of the best for the last. Here is a 

 very fine one : 



The Almighty, who created the earth-for man, and man for 



