Peter Kropotkin

“ Continually we learn that the same scientific discovery, or technical invention, has been made within a few days' distance, in countries a thousand miles apart; as if there were a kind of atmosphere which favours the germination of a given idea at a given moment. ”

“ But a closer acquaintance with British agriculture as a whole discloses many features of inferiority.
However splendid, a meadow remains a meadow, much inferior in productivity to a cornfield; and the fine breeds of cattle appear to be poor creatures as long as each ox requires three acres of land to be fed upon. As regards the crops, certainly one may indulge in some admiration at the average twenty-eight or thirty bushels grown in this country; but when we learn that only 1,600,000 to 1,900,000 acres out of the cultivable 33,000,000 bear such crops, we are quite disappointed. ”

“ To begin by taking the most disadvantageous case: is it possible that the soil of Great Britain, which at present yields food for one-third only of its inhabitants, could provide all the necessary amount and variety of food for 41,000,000 human beings when it covers only 56,000,000 acres all told--forests and rocks, marshes and peat-bogs, cities, railways and fields--out of which only 33,000,000 acres are considered as cultivable? ”

“ Twenty, thirty such fields can be seen at one glance from the top of every hill; and thousands of acres are in that state, notwithstanding that the grandfathers of the present generation have devoted a formidable amount of labour to the clearing of that land from the stones, to fencing it, roughly draining it and the like. In every direction I could see abandoned cottages and orchards going to ruin. A whole population has disappeared, and even its last vestiges must disappear if things continue to go on as they have gone. ”

“ As to the honest longing for more technical education--surely let us all have as much of it as possible: it will be a boon for humanity; for humanity, of course--not for a single nation, because knowledge cannot be cultivated for home use only. Knowledge and invention, boldness of thought and enterprise, conquests of genius and improvements of social organisation have become international growths ”

“ While in France, Belgium, Germany and Denmark the agriculturists did their best to meet the effects of American competition by rendering their culture more intensive in all directions, in this country the already antiquated method of reducing the area under corn crops and laying land for grass continues to prevail, although it ought to be evident that mere grazing will pay no more, and that some effort in the right direction would increase the returns of the corn crops, as also those of the roots and plants cultivated for industrial purposes. ”

“ One million human beings cannot productively cultivate an area of 33,000,000 acres, unless they can resort to the Bonanza farm's methods of culture.
Again, taking Harrow as the centre of my excursions, I could walk five miles towards London, or turning my back upon it, and I could see nothing east or west but meadow land on which they hardly cropped two tons of hay per acre-- scarcely enough to keep alive one milch cow on each two acres. Man is conspicuous by his abscence from those meadows ”

“ The land goes out, of culture, while the area under "deer forests"--that is, under hunting grounds established upon what formerly was arable land for the amusement of the rich--increases at an appalling rate. No need to say that at the same time the Scotch population is emigrating, and Scotland is depopulated at an appalling speed. ”

“ Knowledge and inventive powers are now so thoroughly international that if a simple newspaper paragraph announces to-morrow that the problem of storing force, of printing without inking, or of aerial navigation, has received a practical solution in one country of the world, we may feel sure that within a few weeks the same problem will be solved, almost in the same way, by several inventors of different nationalities. ”

“ Taking everything into consideration, although the Frenchman keeps less cattle, and especially grazes less sheep than the Briton, he nevertheless obtains from his soil nearly all the food that he and his cattle consume. ”

“ As the manufacturing nations of West Europe are meeting with steadily growing difficulties in selling their manufactured goods abroad, and getting food in exchange, they will be compelled to grow their food at home; they will be bound to rely on home customers for their manufactures, and on home producers for their food. ”

“ Of course, there will be plenty of voices to argue that the former supremacy of the pioneers must be maintained at any price: all pioneers are in the habit of saying so. It will be suggested that the pioneers must attain such a superiority of technical knowledge and organisation as to enable them to beat all their younger competitors ”

“ The concentration of landownership in the hands of big landowners; the high profits obtained previously; the development of a class of both landlords and farmers who rely chiefly upon other incomes than those they draw from the land, and for whom farming has thus become a sort of pleasant by-occupation or sport; the rapid development of game reserves for sportsmen, both British and foreign; the absence of men of initiative who would have shown to the nation the necessity of a new departure ”

“ The current opinion is, that it by no means can; and that opinion is so inveterate that we even see men of science, who are generally cautious when dealing with current opinions, endorse that opinion without even taking the trouble of verifying it. ”

“ But with all that, the surface under corn crops is still nearly one-and-a-half million acres below what it was in 1885 and nearly two-and-a-half million acres below 1874. This represents, let us remember it, the bread-food of ten million people.
The cause of this general downward movement is self-evident. It is the desertion, the abandonment of the land. Each crop requiring human labour has had its area reduced ”

“ And if the consumption of meat has really increased in this country, it is due to cheap imported meat, not to the meat that would be produced in these islands.
In short, agriculture has not changed its direction, as we are often told ”

“ Such are the present teachings and the ideas which are current in society at large. And yet it is easy to prove that both are totally erroneous: plenty of food could be grown on the territories of Western Europe for much more than their present populations, and an immense benefit would be derived from doing so. ”

“ But if we take the numbers of horses used in agriculture, unbroken, and kept for breeding, we find only small oscillations between 1,408,790 in 1885 and 1,553,000 in I909. But numbers of horses are imported, as also the oats and a considerable amount of the hay that is required for feeding them. ”

“ And that--within ten miles from Charing Cross, close to a city with 5,000,000 inhabitants supplied with Flemish and Jersey potatoes, French salads and Canadian apples. In the hands of the Paris gardeners, each thousand acres situated within the same distance from the city would be cultivated by at least 2,000 human beings, who would get vegetables to the value of from £50 to £300 per acre. But here the acres which only need human hands to become an inexhaustible source of golden crops lie idle, and they say to us, "Heavy clay!" ”

“ Sir William Armstrong, in his works established in Italy and Japan, has already communicated to Italians and Japanese those capacities for managing huge iron masses which have been nurtured on the Tyne; the uproarious American spirit of enterprise pervades the Old World ”

“ Far from devoting the land freed from cereals to "meat-making," the country further reduced its live stock in 1885-1895, and began to show a slight increase during the last few years only. It had 6,597,964 head of horned cattle in 1885, 6,354,336 in 1895, and 7,057,520 in 1909-1911; 26,534,600 sheep in 1885, 25,792,200 in 1895, and from 26,500,000 to 27,610,000 in 1909-1911. True, the number of horses increased ”