Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/257

Rh can control the lightning from the skies and yet are not able to procure more than an atom of the inexhaustible treasures of food that are concealed in the oceans which deprive us of three fourths of the entire globe. How can we explain the fact that in a period which gives birth to such mechanical marvels as our labor-saving appliances and the more delicate tools and instruments capable of such astonishingly minute and accurate work, we allow swamps, rivers without fish, uncultivated tracts and waste land, to exist in the midst of Europe? How can it be that the generation after Gauss is so-weak in its mathematical faculties, that it does not reckon upon its fingers how much more expensive it is to supply the food needed by the body, by meat from cattle, which require so much productive land to be left waste for their pasturage, instead of by fish, with which the sea is teeming, while it can be used in no other way, or by poultry, which do not require large meadows to roam over, and can be abundantly fed from the refuse of the kitchen?

However I will not proceed any further into details. The fact seems to me sufficiently demonstrated that the cultivation of the soil is the step-child of our civilization. It hardly takes one forward stride where manufactures take a hundred. The only progress realized in the production of food for mankind during several centuries, is the introduction of the potato into Europe, which makes it possible for the operative, the proletaire, to imagine that his hunger is satisfied, when at the same time his body is slowly starving to death for want of proper nutriment, while it enables the capitalist to screw down the wages of his employés to the lowest possible point. Fruit and vegetable gardens, mushroom beds, show us what a wealth of provisions can be produced on the tiniest scrap of ground. Experience teaches us that man's labor, as a