t fifty acres could produce so much.
Yet there were the plain facts in front of one, calculated out. The
thing amounted practically to a revolution in farming. At least it ought
to have. And it would have if those young men had come again to hoe
their field. But it turned out, most unfortunately, that they were busy.
To their great regret they were too busy to come. They had been working
under a free-and-easy arrangement. Each man was to give what time he
could every Saturday. It was left to every man's honour to do what he
could. There was no compulsion. Each man trusted the others to be there.
In fact the thing was not only an experiment in food production, it was
also a new departure in social co-operation. The first Saturday that
those young men worked there were, so I have been told, seventy-five of
them driving in white stakes and running lines. The next Saturday there
were fifteen of them planting potatoes. The rest were busy. The week
after that there was one man hoeing weeds. After that silence fell upon
the deserted garden, broken only by the cry of the chick-a-dee and the
choo-choo feeding on the waving heads of the thistles.

But I have indicated only two or three of the ways of failing at food
production. There are ever so many more. What amazes me, in returning
to the city, is to find the enormous quantities of produce of all sorts
offered for sale in the markets. It is an odd thing that last spring,
by a queer oversight, we never thought, any of us, of this process of
increasing the supply. If every patriotic man would simply take a large
basket and go to the market every day and buy all that he could carry
away there need be no further fear of a food famine.

And, meantime, my own vegetables are on their way. They are in a soap
box with bars across the top, coming by freight. They weigh forty-six
pounds, including the box. They represent the result of four months'
arduous toil in sun, wind, and storm. Yet it is pleasant to think that I
shall be able to feed with them some poor family of refugees during the
rigour of the winter. Either that or give them to the hens. I certainly
won't eat the rotten things myself.

XV. The Perplexity Column as Done by the Jaded Journalist

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