umption of a man is thus obtained from less than a quarter of an
acre.

And the more intense the culture is, the less work is expended to obtain
a bushel of wheat. Machinery replaces man at the preliminary work and
for the improvements needed by the land--such as draining, clearing of
stones--which will double the crops in future, once and for ever.
Sometimes nothing but keeping the soil free of weeds, without manuring,
allows an average soil to yield excellent crops from year to year. It
has been done for forty years in succession at Rothamstead, in
Hertfordshire.

However, let us not write an agricultural romance, but be satisfied with
a crop of 44 bushels per acre. That needs no exceptional soil, but
merely a rational culture; and let us see what it means.

The 3,600,000 individuals who inhabit the two departments of Seine and
Seine-et-Oise consume yearly for their food a little less than 22
million bushels of cereals, chiefly wheat; and in our hypothesis they
would have to cultivate, in order to obtain this crop, 494,200 acres out
of the 1,507,300 acres which they possess. It is evident they would not
cultivate them with spades. That would need too much time--96 work-days
of 5 hours per acre. It would be preferable to improve the soil once for
all--to drain what needed draining, to level what needed levelling, to
clear the soil of stones, were it even necessary to spend 5 million days
of 5 hours in this preparatory work--an average of 10 work-days to each
acre.

Then they would plough with the steam-digger, which would take one and
three-fifths of a day per acre, and they would give another one and
three-fifths of a day for working with the double plough. Seeds would be
sorted by steam instead of taken haphazard, and they would be carefully
sown in rows instead of being thrown to the four winds. Now all this
work would not take 10 days of 5 hours per acre if the work were done
under good conditions. But if 10 million work-days are given to good
culture during 3 or 4 years, the result will be that later on crops of
44 to 55 bushels per acre will be obtained by only working half the
time.

Fifteen million work-days will thus have been spent to give bread to a
population of 3,600,000 inhabitants. And the work would be such that
everyone could do it without having muscles of steel, or without having
even worked the ground before. The initiative and the general
distribution of work would come from those who know th