Page:Robert Barr - Lord Stranleigh Philanthropist.djvu/146

 made a rifleman from mud, "drilled a black man white and made a mummy fight."

"'If an Englishman, as is proven, attain such success with the semi-savage, ignorant Egyptian, in preparing him for the destructive art of war, how much more effective should be the result if an Englishman took his derelict fellow citizens and trained them in the arts of peace, and if in doing so he taught Great Britain the way to become self-sustaining in the matter of food, how much greater would be his claim to our gratitude.

"'I find in chapter twelve of Robert Blatchford's book, Britain for the British," that one acre of our land yields twenty-eight bushels of wheat, while the same amount of land in certain parts of the United States gives eighty-seven to a hundred and fifteen bushels. Minnesota raises thirty-one tons of potatoes to the acre, while on the same surface Great Britain produces only six tons. Eight-and-a-half bushels of wheat will feed one man for a year. By intensive culture, Major Hallet raised that amount of wheat on one-twentieth of an acre; that is, an acre produced the almost incredible quantity of a hundred and seventy bushels.

"'My proposal is this. Purchase fifty acres of fertile land, which just now is cheap enough even