any millions of hundredweights of food are yearly
squandered because the provisions for gathering in the crops are
inadequate, or there is a scarcity of hands at the right time. Many a
corn field, many a filled barn, whole agricultural establishments are
burned down, because the insurance fetches higher gains. Food and goods
are destroyed for the same reason that ships are caused to go to the
bottom with their whole crews.[234] A large part of the crops is yearly
ruined by our military manoeuvres; the costs of manoeuvres that last
only a few days run up to hundreds of thousands of marks; and there are
many of them every year. Moreover, as stated before, large fields are
taken from cultivation for these purposes.

Nor must it be forgotten that there is the sea yet to be added to the
means for increasing the volume of food. The area of water is as 18 to 7
to that of land,--two and a half times as large. Its enormous wealth of
food still awaits a rational system of exploitation. The future opens a
prospect to mankind, wholly different from the gloomy picture drawn by
our Malthusians.

Who can say where the line is to be drawn to our chemical, physical,
physiologic knowledge? Who would venture to predict what giant
undertakings--so considered from our modern standpoint--the people of
future centuries will execute with the object in view of introducing
material changes in the climates of the nations and in the methods of
exploiting their soil?

We see to-day, under the capitalist social system, undertakings executed
that were thought impossible or insane a century ago. Wide isthmuses are
cut through; tunnels, miles long and bored into the bowels of the earth,
join peoples whom towering mountains separate; others are dug under the
beds of seas to shorten distances, and avoid disturbances and dangers
that otherwise the countries thus separated are exposed to. Where is the
spot at which could be said: "So far and no farther?"

If all these improvements were to be undertaken simultaneously, we would
be found to have, not too many but too few people. The race must
multiply considerably if it is to do justice to all the tasks that are
waiting for it. Neither is the soil under cultivation utilized as it
should be, nor are there people enough to cultivate three-fourths of its
face. Our relative over-production, continuously produced by the
capitalist system to the injury of the workingman and of society, will,
at a higher grade