production fourfold or more, and yet use for that _less_
work than we are using now.

We go further. We assert that agriculture is in the same position: those
who cultivate the soil, like the manufacturers, already could increase
their production, not only fourfold but tenfold, and they can put it
into practice as soon as they feel the need of it,--as soon as a
socialist organization of work will be established instead of the
present capitalistic one.

Each time agriculture is spoken of, men imagine a peasant bending over
the plough, throwing badly assorted corn haphazard into the ground and
waiting anxiously for what the good or bad season will bring forth; they
think of a family working from morn to night and reaping as reward a
rude bed, dry bread, and coarse beverage. In a word, they picture "the
savages" of La Bruyere.

And for these men, ground down to such a misery, the utmost relief that
society proposes, is to reduce their taxes or their rent. But even most
social reformers do not care to imagine a cultivator standing erect,
taking leisure, and producing by a few hours' work per day sufficient
food to nourish, not only his own family, but a hundred men more at the
least. In their most glowing dreams of the future Socialists do not go
beyond American extensive culture, which, after all, is but the infancy
of agricultural art.

But the thinking agriculturist has broader ideas to-day--his conceptions
are on a far grander scale. He only asks for a fraction of an acre in
order to produce sufficient vegetables for a family; and to feed
twenty-five horned beasts he needs no more space than he formerly
required to feed one; his aim is to make his own soil, to defy seasons
and climate, to warm both air and earth around the young plant; to
produce, in a word, on one acre what he used to gather from fifty acres,
and that without any excessive fatigue--by greatly reducing, on the
contrary, the total of former labour. He knows that we will be able to
feed everybody by giving to the culture of the fields no more time than
what each can give with pleasure and joy.

This is the present tendency of agriculture.

While scientific men, led by Liebig, the creator of the chemical theory
of agriculture, often got on the wrong tack in their love of mere
theories, unlettered agriculturists opened up new roads to prosperity.
Market-gardeners of Paris, Troyes, Rouen, Scotch and English gardeners,
Flemish and Lombardian farmers, p