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 Mahomet 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, 
