Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/255

Rh agricultural products sufficient for every human being to have enough and to spare? Why? Owing to one single reason: the accumulation of capital has led to a one-sided and unnatural development of our civilization. Civilization is crowding towards manufactures and trade all the time, turning its back upon the production of food. Physiocracy which teaches us that the true wealth of a country lies solely in its agricultural products, has been held up to ridicule during the last hundred years, by the official science of political economy, which has condescended so far as to be the court jester of the present arrangement of the economic world, founded upon egotism and Capital.

The son of the soil forsakes his plough, the freedom of the country and nature and the pure, abundant sunshine and air, to force his way into that fatal prison, the factory, and take up his abode in some pestilential tenement house in the big city, in obedience to a kind of suicidal instinct. The same instinct seems to impel the human race as a whole, to abandon the food-producing soil and cast themselves into the slough of manufacturing industry where they suffocate and starve The whole genius of mankind, all its powers of invention, contrivance and investigation, all its enquiry and experiments, are applied exclusively to manufactures. We see the results: the machines grow more and more wonderful, the systems of labor more and more perfect, the production of goods more and more prolific. But hardly one inventive genius in a hundred busies himself with the production of food. If only one half as much study and ingenuity were applied to this production as to the industrial arts, physiological want would not only cease to exist on earth, but would become absolutely inconceivable. But this branch of human industry, the most important of all, is the very one