lf from the combined bourgeois
forces.

III

We have seen how the three and one-half million inhabitants of the two
departments round Paris could find ample bread by cultivating only a
third of their territory. Let us now pass on to cattle.

Englishmen, who eat much meat, consume on an average a little less than
220 pounds a year per adult. Supposing all meats consumed were oxen,
that makes a little less than the third of an ox. An ox a year for five
individuals (including children) is already a sufficient ration. For
three and one-half million inhabitants this would make an annual
consumption of 700,000 head of cattle.

To-day, with the pasture system, we need at least five million acres to
nourish 660,000 head of cattle. This makes nine acres per each head of
horned cattle. Nevertheless, with prairies moderately watered by spring
water (as recently done on thousands of acres in the southwest of
France), one and one-fourth million acres already suffice. But if
intensive culture is practiced, and beet-root is grown for fodder, you
only need a quarter of that area, that is to say, about 310,000 acres.
And if we have recourse to maize and practice ensilage (the compression
of fodder while green) like Arabs, we obtain fodder on an area of
217,500 acres.

In the environs of Milan, where sewer water is used to irrigate the
fields, fodder for two to three horned cattle per each acre is obtained
on an area of 22,000 acres; and on a few favoured fields, up to 177 tons
of hay to the 10 acres have been cropped, the yearly provender of 36
milch cows. Nearly nine acres per head of cattle are needed under the
pasture system, and only two and one-half acres for nine oxen or cows
under the new system. These are the opposite extremes in modern
agriculture.

In Guernsey, on a total of 9,884 acres utilized, nearly half (4,695
acres) are covered with cereals and kitchen-gardens; only 5,189 acres
remain as meadows. On these 5,189 acres, 1,480 horses, 7,260 head of
cattle, 900 sheep, and 4,200 pigs are fed, which makes more than three
head of cattle per two acres, without reckoning the sheep or the pigs.
It is needless to add that the fertility of the soil is made by seaweed
and chemical manures.

Returning to our three and one-half million inhabitants belonging to
Paris and its environs, we see that the land necessary for the rearing
of cattle comes down from five million acres to 197,000. Well, then, let
us not stop at the low