order to pay an average rent of L32 per
acre.

But do not these facts, which can be verified by every one, prove that
17,300 acres (of the 519,000 remaining to us) would suffice to give all
necessary vegetables, as well as a liberal amount of fruit to the three
and one-half million inhabitants of our two departments?

As to the quantity of work necessary to produce these fruits and
vegetables, it would amount to fifty million work-days of five hours (50
days per adult male), if we measure by the market-gardeners' standard of
work. But we could reduce this quantity if we had recourse to the
process in vogue in Jersey and Guernsey. We must also remember that the
Paris market-gardener is forced to work so hard because he mostly
produces early season fruits, the high prices of which have to pay for
fabulous rents, and that this system of culture entails more work than
is necessary for growing the ordinary staple-food vegetables and fruit.
Besides, the market-gardeners of Paris, not having the means to make a
great outlay on their gardens, and being obliged to pay heavily for
glass, wood, iron, and coal, obtain their artificial heat out of manure,
while it can be had at much less cost in hothouses.

IV

The market-gardeners, we say, are forced to become machines and to
renounce all joys of life in order to obtain their marvellous crops. But
these hard grinders have rendered a great service to humanity in
teaching us that the soil can be "made." They _make_ it with old
hot-beds of manure, which have already served to give the necessary
warmth to young plants and to early fruit; and they make it in such
great quantity that they are compelled to sell it in part, otherwise it
would raise the level of their gardens by one inch every year. They do
it so well (so Barral teaches us, in his "Dictionary of Agriculture," in
an article on market-gardeners) that in recent contracts, the
market-gardener stipulates that he will carry away his soil with him
when he leaves the bit of ground he is cultivating. Loam carried away on
carts, with furniture and glass frames--that is the answer of practical
cultivators to the learned treatises of a Ricardo, who represented rent
as a means of equalizing the natural advantages of the soil. "The soil
is worth what the man is worth," that is the gardeners' motto.

And yet the market-gardeners of Paris and Rouen labour three times as
hard to obtain the same results as their fellow-workers in Gue