THE WAR GARDEN VICTORIOUS 
15 
National War Garden Commission; and in response to 
its energetic campaign toward this end, the people in 
1917 put to work more than 3,000,000 pieces of such 
uncultivated territory. In 1918 they ferreted out addi- 
tional vast areas. The total number of war gardens for 
this latter season is conservatively estimated, after a 
careful survey, at 5,285,000. 
With war’s destruction occurring to an undreamed 
of and terrifying extent, involving the destruction of 
all kinds of material wealth as well as food, it soon be- 
came apparent that food shortage was only one of many 
shortages the world was facing. Conservation of 
everything became a crying need. The war garden 
offered an opportunity for conservation along many 
lines. First came the conservation of food itself. The 
daily ration of a soldier in our army consists of about 
four and a quarter pounds of food. A million soldiers 
would require at least 4,250,000 pounds of tood a day. 
At this rate a year’s supply of food for a million men 
would weigh 1,551,250,000 pounds — and we were plan- 
ning to raise an army of four or five million men. To 
take from the ordinary channels of trade the colossal 
supplies necessary to feed such an army, with no extra 
food to replace that thus subtracted, would mean that 
householders would be forced to pay ruinously high 
prices for the food that remained. War gardening 
offered an opportunity to offset, in part, this tremen- 
dous drain on our commercial supplies, to eke out those 
supplies and make them go farther — which is really 
conservation in its truest sense. 
