8 THE WAR GARDEN VICTORIOUS 



cultural system, weighed in the balance, was found 

 wanting. The war drums which had called 3,000,000 

 men from the farms of France, had also created the lure 

 of high wages in munition plants, and further robbed 

 the farms of America. When the appeal went out to 

 our farmers to produce more food they replied in a 

 memorial to the President, that under existing con- 

 ditions the previous rate of production could hardly be 

 maintained, let alone increased — a prophecy which later 

 proved true. 



In the lexicon of the typical American there is no 

 such word as "cannot." Keen-eyed Americans who saw 

 the situation as it really was, decided that if the moun- 

 tain would not go to Mahomet, they would see that 

 Mahomet went to the mountain. The mountain in this 

 case was labor, and A/fahomet the space necessary for 

 the production of food. These men, with that vision 

 without which the people perish, possessed imagination. 

 They saw little fountains of foodstuffs springing up 

 everywhere, and the products of these tiny fountains, 

 like rain-drops on a watershed, uniting to form rushing 

 streams which would fill the great reservoirs built for 

 their compounding. The tiny fountains were innumer- 

 able back-yard and vacant-lot gardens. The problem 

 was to create these fountains. 



This could be accomplished only by the systematic 

 education of the people, the one hundred million people 

 of the United States. Such a huge educational cam- 

 paign could be carried out only through the customary 

 channels of publicity — the daily press, the periodicals. 



