easants of Jersey, Guernsey, and
farmers on the Scilly Isles have opened up such large horizons that the
mind hesitates to grasp them. While up till lately a family of peasants
needed at least seventeen to twenty acres to live on the produce of the
soil--and we know how peasants live--we can now no longer say what is
the minimum area on which all that is necessary to a family can be
grown, even including articles of luxury, if the soil is worked by means
of intensive culture.

Twenty years ago it could already be asserted that a population of
thirty million individuals could live very well, without importing
anything, on what could be grown in Great Britain. But now, when we see
the progress recently made in France, in Germany, in England, and when
we contemplate the new horizons which open before us, we can say that in
cultivating the earth as it is already cultivated in many places, even
on poor soils, fifty or sixty million inhabitants to the territory of
Great Britain would still be a very feeble proportion to what man could
extract from the soil.

In any case (as we are about to demonstrate) we may consider it as
absolutely proved that if to-morrow Paris and the two departments of
Seine and of Seine-et-Oise organized themselves as an Anarchist commune,
in which all worked with their hands, and if the entire universe
refused to send them a single bushel of wheat, a single head of cattle,
a single basket of fruit, and left them only the territory of the two
departments, they could not only produce all the corn, meat, and
vegetables necessary for themselves, but also vegetables and fruit which
are now articles of luxury, in sufficient quantities for all.

And, in addition, we affirm that the sum total of this labour would be
far less than that expended at present to feed these people with corn
harvested in Auvergne and Russia, with vegetables produced a little
everywhere by extensive agriculture, and with fruit grown in the South.

It is self-evident that we in nowise desire all exchange to be
suppressed, nor that each region should strive to produce that which
will only grow in its climate by a more or less artificial culture. But
we care to draw attention to the fact that the theory of exchange, such
as is understood to-day, is strangely exaggerated--that exchange is
often useless and even harmful. We assert, moreover, that people have
never had a right conception of the immense labour of Southern wine
growers,