ure grounds of the landed
gentry are to be found. These thousands of acres only await the skilled
labour of the husbandman to surround Paris with fields infinitely more
fertile and productive than the steppes of southern Russia, where the
soil is dried up by the sun. Nor will labour be lacking. To what should
the two million citizens of Paris turn their attention, when they would
be no longer catering for the luxurious fads and amusements of Russian
princes, Roumanian grandees, and wives of Berlin financiers?

With all the mechanical inventions of the century; with all the
intelligence and technical skill of the worker accustomed to deal with
complicated machinery; with inventors, chemists, professors of botany,
practical botanists like the market gardeners of Gennevilliers; with all
the plant that they could use for multiplying and improving machinery;
and, finally, with the organizing spirit of the Parisian people, their
pluck and energy--with all these at its command, the agriculture of the
anarchist Commune of Paris would be a very different thing from the rude
husbandry of the Ardennes.

Steam, electricity, the heat of the sun, and the breath of the wind,
will ere long be pressed into service. The steam plough and the steam
harrow will quickly do the rough work of preparation, and the soil, thus
cleaned and enriched, will only need the intelligent care of man, and of
woman even more than man, to be clothed with luxuriant vegetation--not
once but three or four times in the year.

Thus, learning the art of horticulture from experts, and trying
experiments in different methods on small patches of soil reserved for
the purpose, vying with each other to obtain the best returns, finding
in physical exercise, without exhaustion or overwork, the health and
strength which so often flags in cities,--men, women and children will
gladly turn to the labour of the fields, when it is no longer a slavish
drudgery, but has become a pleasure, a festival, a renewal of health and
joy.

"There are no barren lands; the earth is worth what man is worth"--that
is the last word of modern agriculture. Ask of the earth, and she will
give you bread, provided that you ask aright.

A district, though it were as small as the two departments of the Seine
and the Seine-et-Oise, and with so great a city as Paris to feed, would
be practically sufficient to grow upon it all the food supplies, which
otherwise might fail to reach it.

The combin