Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/259

Rh are doubtless numerous causes, but there is probably none more potent than the phenomenal growth of science in the past hundred years. If we are about to have a new democracy it is because science with a thousand charges has shattered old ideas and institutions into fragments and given in their stead the materials for new constructions.

Primary in this relation of science to democracy is the change which has been wrought in the economic status of the men who work with their hands. As not before in the history of mankind, laborers may have food, they may have schools, they may travel and wear good clothes; they may have household conveniences, baths and lighted rooms, unknown to kings and nobles of a century ago. In fifty years our civilization has changed from one of deficit to one of surplus and the specter of a near world famine has disappeared.

For a hundred years following 1798, men were taught that their welfare depended upon the limitation of the population. Malthus had pointed out that the produce of the world could be made to increase in but an arithmetical ratio, while the unrestrained human race was enlarging in a geometrical ratio. The economic deficit which the world faced at the beginning of the nineteenth century could on this theory only become greater and greater until the whole race of men would be struggling for the insufficient fruits of a niggard earth. But in the very hour when Malthus and John Stuart Mill were most orthodox the theory was being already discredited by a change in the world's production. From an earth which gave too little for the sustenance of her children we have come to a condition where men live in the midst of abundance. We are not so much troubled now by the scarcity of food as by its inadequate distribution. "For the first time in the history of civilization" writes Prince Kropotkin, "mankind has reached a point where the means of satisfying its needs are in excess of the needs themselves."

For untold generations, slaves and peasants and farmers had gotten with pain the barest subsistence from the soil, but, suddenly, as if by magic, two blades of grass began to grow where one had grown before and an acre which had yielded thirty bushels of corn began to give fifty and sixty and a hundred. The area for the cultivation of foods was widely extended by the development of the American continent and exploration and colonization in South America and Africa. New articles of food came into existence. Beets, hitherto but a food for cattle, began to give sugar, and tropical fruits, especially the banana, found their way to every market in the world. The tomato, long suspected of being poisonous and, down to the middle of the nineteenth century, distrusted as a possible forerunner of cancer, has become a food staple. The potato, unknown before the sixteenth century and at the beginning of the eighteenth regarded as a fit food only for swine and