Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/211

Rh want but struggles to overcome them. If he is a hunter, and the game leaves his usual hunting grounds, he starts in search of others. If he is a farmer on unproductive soil, he packs up and emigrates when he learns of more fertile fields that he can get. If other men stand between him and his food, he takes his weapon and kills them, or is killed by them. Abundance is then the reward of strength and courage. So the tide of emigration sets from unfruitful districts into those blessed by the sun; the heroism of a Genseric, of an Attila, a Ghengis Khan and a William of Normandy, has its origin in the stomach, and on the bloodiest and most glorious battle-fields, which the poets sing and history loves to dwell upon, the question of the midday meal was decided by the iron dice. In short, primitive man will not endure genuine poverty, that is, hunger. He takes up his arms against the encroaching wretchedness at once and wrests for himself the superabundance of the enemy or dies beneath his hatchet, before he perishes of privation. Absolute poverty is also incompatible with a civilization which has not yet passed beyond the standpoint of physiocracy. As long as a people are only familiar with agriculture, cattle-raising and domestic industries, although they may be poor in money and articles of luxury, yet the necessaries of life are within the reach of every individual. Only when man loses his direct dependence upon food-producing Mother Earth, only when he forsakes the furrow in the field and passes beyond the reach of Nature who offers him bread and fruits, milk and honey, game and fish, only when he shuts himself up behind the city walls and gives, up his share of forest and stream, procuring his food and drink no longer from the grand store-house of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but by an exchange of the products of his labor for the gifts of nature monopolized by others,