THE WASTES OF MODERN CIVILIZATION. 515 



But the justice of Varnhagen's indictment is perhaps most 

 forcibly illustrated in the time and labor saving contrivances of 

 modern civilization, as contrasted with the enormous waste inci- 

 dent to the evils of life under abnormal circumstances. 



The apparent shiftlessness of animals and savages is often due 

 to their confidence in the spontaneous bounty of Nature. Apes 

 will nibble and fling away dozens of wild figs for one they eat, well 

 knowing that the forests will continue to produce millions of simi- 

 lar fruits. Nomads exhaust the pastures of a whole river-delta, 

 and then drive their herds farther inland, having found by ex- 

 perience that, before the return of spring, the coast-land meadows 

 will have recovered their luxuriance. 



We pity the ignorance of the Circassian peasant who wastes 

 his time and energy by plowing his highland farm with an imple- 

 ment resembling a crooked fence-rail; but together with other 

 old-fashioned things that barbarian has retained his primitive 

 confidence in the trustworthiness of his natural instincts, and con- 

 sequently devotes every square yard of his field to the production 

 of palatable and nutritious vegetables. 



" Whatever is natural is wrong," was for centuries the shibbo- 

 leth of our spiritual taskmasters, and that doctrine has borne its 

 fruit in the reckless disregard of our natural intuitions. The 

 shocking taste of a poisonous weed or liquid is generally accepted 

 as a prima facie proof of its wholesomeness, and many millions 

 of acres, plowed and harrowed with highly improved apparatus, 

 are wasted on the production of not only useless but positively 

 pernicious harvests. Our prohibition orators bewail the vast area 

 of arable soil wasted on distillery crops, but in the eyes of science 

 the alcohol-habit is only a special form of the stimulant-vice, 

 which, in the course of the last fifty years, has assumed more 

 gigantic proportions than in the most bibulous era of pagan an- 

 tiquity. The official statistics of the liquor traffic generally allow 

 one bushel of grain for two gallons of spirits, and three bushels 

 for one barrel of beer. By that estimate, the distilleries of the 

 United States alone consumed in the last few years an annual 

 average of thirty-five million bushels of grain, the breweries at 

 least twenty millions. The aggregate of that wasted farm-prod- 

 uce would have made more than a billion four-pound loaves of 

 bread, or nearly a hundred loaves for every household in North 

 1 America. Placed side by side, the bushel-measures containing 

 i that grain would form a chain equal in extent to the circumfer- 

 1 ence of the earth. But the area of the land thus * tilled to bring 

 forth a harvest of misery, crime, and disease " is only a fraction of 

 b the total portion of arable fields cultivated to subserve the various 

 forms of the stimulant-vice. Tobacco, tea, coffee, pulque, and 

 i opium, together with all the toxic stimulants prepared from tree- 



