powerful machinery, can produce in a few months enough wheat to maintain
ten thousand people for a whole year. And where man wishes to double his
produce, to treble it, to multiply it a hundred-fold, he _makes_ the
soil, gives to each plant the requisite care, and thus obtains enormous
returns. While the hunter of old had to scour fifty or sixty square
miles to find food for his family, the civilized man supports his
household, with far less pains, and far more certainty, on a thousandth
part of that space. Climate is no longer an obstacle. When the sun
fails, man replaces it by artificial heat; and we see the coming of a
time when artificial light also will be used to stimulate vegetation.
Meanwhile, by the use of glass and hot water pipes, man renders a given
space ten and fifty times more productive than it was in its natural
state.

The prodigies accomplished in industry are still more striking. With the
co-operation of those intelligent beings, modern machines--themselves
the fruit of three or four generations of inventors, mostly unknown--a
hundred men manufacture now the stuff to provide ten thousand persons
with clothing for two years. In well-managed coal mines the labour of a
hundred miners furnishes each year enough fuel to warm ten thousand
families under an inclement sky. And we have lately witnessed the
spectacle of wonderful cities springing up in a few months for
international exhibitions, without interrupting in the slightest degree
the regular work of the nations.

And if in manufactures as in agriculture, and as indeed through our
whole social system, the labour, the discoveries, and the inventions of
our ancestors profit chiefly the few, it is none the less certain that
mankind in general, aided by the creatures of steel and iron which it
already possesses, could already procure an existence of wealth and ease
for every one of its members.

Truly, we are rich--far richer than we think; rich in what we already
possess, richer still in the possibilities of production of our actual
mechanical outfit; richest of all in what we might win from our soil,
from our manufactures, from our science, from our technical knowledge,
were they but applied to bringing about the well-being of all.

II

In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why
this painful drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best paid
workman, this uncertainty for the morrow, in the midst of all the wealth