laves. Here hundreds of
acres will be covered with glass houses, and men and women will tend
with gentle hands the young plants. Elsewhere hundreds of acres will
be cleared and broken up by machinery worked by steam, improved by
manures and enriched by phosphates. Laughing troops of workers will in
due time cover these fields with seeds, guided in their work and in
their experiments by those who understand agriculture, but all of them
continually animated by the powerful and practical spirit of a people
that has waked up from a long sleep and sees before it the happiness
of all, that light-house of humanity shedding its rays afar. And in
two or three months an early harvest will relieve their most pressing
needs, and provide with food a people who after centuries of silent
hope will at last be able to satisfy its hunger or eat as its appetite
desires. Meanwhile the popular genius, the genius of a people that is
rising and knows its own requirements, will seek new means of
production which only need the test of experiment in order to come
into general use. Attempts will be made to concentrate light, that
well-known factor in agriculture, which in the latitude of Yakutsk
ripens barley in forty-five days, and to produce it artificially, and
with light rival heat in promoting the growth of plants. Some genius
of the future will invent an instrument to guide the rays of the sun,
and compel them to do work without it being necessary to seek in the
depths of the earth for the heat contained in coal. Efforts will be
made to water the ground with solutions of minute organisms--an idea
of yesterday that will make it possible to introduce into the ground
the little living cells that are necessary for plants in order to feed
the young roots, and to decompose the component parts of the earth,
and make them fit to be assimilated." Kropotkin adds, rendering
criticism unnecessary: "We shall make experiments, but we need go no
farther, for we should enter upon the realms of romance."

We need not now consider whether the statement that production is
already surpassing the capacity of consumption is really quite true;
the vast majority of economists is of a different opinion. But even if
it were so, and if production should further increase, Kropotkin
himself admits that the necessary presupposition of abundant
production is rational cultivation. But the first condition of such
rational agriculture is fixed organisation. This condition i