igo 



LOOK OVER THE FENCE. 



the mills received low wages and produced only a 

 few yards in a day. The owner of _ the mill paid a 

 high price for his machinery, and had to be content 

 with small dividends. To-day sheetings are low, 

 wages are high, and yet machinery, by reason of its 

 higher speed, really produces more cloth and pays 

 a larger dividend. The interest on the plant is 

 lower, and yet the profits are greater. It is not 

 true that machinery makes the rich richer and the 

 poor poorer. Machinery enables the poor to earn 

 more for less labor and to buy sheetings cheaper, 

 while the mill owner, paying less interest, earns 

 less per yard of cloth made and more per dollar in- 

 vested in machinery. 



Is there not here a hint for the garden ? Food 

 is undoubtedly cheaper than a hundred or even 

 twenty years ago. It takes less labor to earn a 

 barrel of flour than ever before. Millions of our 

 people have to-day a better bill of fare oil their 

 tables than even the rich had a hundred years ago. 

 Our city working-people would not and could not 

 go to the dreary and monotonous dinner table of the 

 farmer of fifty years ago. Fruit is for sale on 

 every street corner. Fifty years ago it was a 

 luxury only for the well-to-do. We may thank the 

 Italian for teaching us the value of cheap fruit 

 stands. The canning and preserving of food has 

 cheapened the cost of living and made a market 

 for enormous quantities of fruits and vegetables. 

 There is the sewing machine. It has made it 

 easy to have a great variety of clothing, and as a 

 result we wear more clothes than did our fathers, 

 and this means millions of dollars poured out on 

 our cotton fields. 



In all manufactures we see a steady concentra- 

 tion of capital and labor. The shoe shop has 

 absorbed the little shoemakers. At one time the 

 fishermen on the New England coast had, every 

 man, a little shed or room set off from his house 

 where he made shoes in the winter by hand. If 

 we depended to-day entirely on hand-made shoes 

 we would soon be a bare-foot nation. On the other 

 hand, in this immense business of raising food we 

 cling to the old hand methods. It may be a ques- 

 tion whether the complaint of the poor profits of 

 gardening may not spring from the very fact 

 that we raise food too much by hand. Wheat 

 is raised in the northwest on the factory principle. 

 It is manufactured food, and the great wheat-pro- 



ducing places are not farms, but factories employ- 

 ing land instead of shops. How is it possible for 

 one man in New York state with two horses and a 

 day laborer to compete with a wheat factory ? He 

 cannot, and the sooner we look squarely over the 

 garden fence and see things as they are, the better 

 for all concerned. 



The gardens are here. We live on them and 

 by them. The thing to do is to change our meth- 

 ods. If we cannot raise wheat we must do some- 

 thing else. Every fourth person in the country 

 looks to us for his daily food. He is better able to 

 pay than ever before, but it is not to be expected 

 that he will pay the old prices. We must make 

 food cheap. The city workman is in a shop built 

 on capital that pays two and a half per cent. How 

 can we feed him and pay six per cent, on the value 

 of our land ? 



Those things suggest many serious problems to 

 the American gardener. Our first glance over the 

 fence shows us not the gloomy outlook we had 

 thought, but everything to encourage. More and 

 more people to be fed every year. Less and less 

 people in the business of raising food. Actual 

 lower prices for garden products and a thousand 

 times more food wanted. Cities not only devour 

 enormous quantities of food, but the eaters are 

 growing wonderfully critical. They want variety, 

 they want things out of season and they want the 

 luxuries. Lettuce is on more dinner tables to-day 

 than fifty years ago, and somewhere there must be 

 hundreds of acres devoted to lettuce that was then 

 woodland or pasture. 



This glance over the fence shows so many things 

 to study and examine that it may be well to look 

 wider afield, to try and see where our gardens 

 are drifting to, and to try and guide them back to 

 the prosperity they are said once to have had. The 

 American Garden aims to help in all wise and 

 proper ways. It certainly aims to tell the truth, 

 and to call a spade a spade. It hopes to look over 

 the fence again to talk with merchants, planters, 

 farmers, storekeepers, railroad men, bankers and 

 statesmen to see what they say of the future of this 

 immense question of feeding the people. Perhaps 

 from these wide out-looks over the country we may 

 find something of benefit to every man and women 

 who has a farm, plantation, orchard or garden. 



Charles Barnard. 



