Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/258

244 general thing, can nowhere be employed more lucratively than in agriculture. If a man should work over his field with the shovel and spade instead of the summary plough he would find that a plot of ground of incredibly small size would be sufficient to support him., But mankind is suffering for want of food, provisions are growing more and more expensive, and the wages-receiver must work an increased number of hours each day to get enough to eat. Nature shows man that he can not live apart from her, without the soil, that he requires the field as the fish requires water. Man recognizes that he sinks lower and lower when he forsakes the soil, that the farmer is the only one who remains healthy and strong, while the city yaps the very marrow in the bones of its inhabitants, rendering them liable to disease and unfruitful, so that each family absolutely rots out in two or three generations. The city would become in a hundred years an enormous cemetery, without a single living being within its walls, if it were not for the fact that there is a constant influx of people from the country to fill up the ranks left vacant by death. In spite of their knowledge and appreciation of these facts men continue to abandon the fruitful fields and flock to the cities, to tear themselves away from life and throw themselves into the arms of death.

Now the professor of political economy steps up again and says with an air of bland confidence and intrepidity that the measure of development to which the manufacturing industries of a country have attained, is at the same time, the measure of its civilization, and that an advanced stage of manufactures is a blessing to the nation as it makes the goods produced so cheap as to be within the reach of the poorest. This is one of the most widely spread and most frequently repeated lies with which Capital seeks to deceive mankind. A plague upon such