Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/512

508 suggested by Ruskin. Suppose that five men were to take a tract of a thousand acres for the purpose of running a general farm. Learned in the art of scientific agriculture, these men provide the necessary tools, equipment, fertilizers and seeds, prepare the ground, sow the crops, harvest the grain, potatoes, fruit and vegetables, and take them to market. Where they find their land too wet, they drain it; if, perchance, the tract is too dry, they irrigate; and if a test shows that a certain field needs lime, they promptly apply lime. These men are farming the land. They do not wait for the land to produce a living for them, but instead, they use the land in every conceivable way.

Suppose that, instead of fertilizing, irrigating and draining, these men upon discovering that one plot was very fertile, farmed only that plot, leaving the less fertile parts of the farm untilled; suppose that, when water stood in a field, they invoked the aid of physics and mathematics, ascertained that this field was low, and therefore bound to be wet; suppose that they abandoned a hill plot which would not raise tobacco without even attempting to ascertain whether it would grow buckwheat; suppose that after venturing timidly to try a few minor experiments, these men, discouraged and forlorn, should assemble around a stone, and, raising their hands to the sky, should beseech some higher power to make water run up-hill or tobacco grow on buckwheat land. Or, instead of praying, imagine their hopeless, hang-dog air as they gazed dejectedly over their thousand acres, exclaiming: "Alas, the law of gravitation makes our low land wet; tobacco will not grow on the highland; yonder field contains no lime for our clover crop; and even the cattle in the hill pasture suffer from lack of water."

What a picture! You sneer, contemptuously. "What sane man would talk so?" you demand. "The illustration approaches the ridiculous. Beseech a higher power? Bemoan the law of gravitation? Fiddlesticks! Irrigate, drain, lime, water, fertilize, and the land will bring forth in abundance."

True, true, but listen! Ninety million people, some of them intelligent men and women, living in one of the most fertile regions of the whole earth, possessed of boundless natural resources, of knowledge and of energy, have suffered for a century from devastating industrial depressions; have watched little children work their fingers raw in the coal breakers; have witnessed an exploitation of women that has required two hundred thousand of them to sell their bodies; have tolerated sodden misery, poverty, vice, criminality; have permitted one small group in the community to possess itself of the natural resources on which all depend, and to exact a monopoly price, from all, for the use of those resources; and now, after generations of this gruesome motion picture, these sane, strong men and women raise their hands to a higher power, or slink dejectedly into their caricature homes, making