ost
pressing wants, and provide food for a people who, after so many
centuries of expectation, will at least be able to appease their hunger
and eat according to their appetite.

In the meanwhile, popular genius, the genius of a nation which revolts
and knows its wants, will work at experimenting with new processes of
culture that we already catch a glimpse of, and that only need the
baptism of experience to become universal. Light will be experimented
with--that unknown agent of culture which makes barley ripen in
forty-five days under the latitude of Yakutsk; light, concentrated or
artificial, will rival heat in hastening the growth of plants. A Mouchot
of the future will invent a machine to guide the rays of the sun and
make them work, so that we shall no longer seek sun-heat stored in coal
in the depths of the earth. They will experiment the watering of the
soil with cultures of micro-organisms--a rational idea, conceived but
yesterday, which will permit us to give to the soil those little living
beings, necessary to feed the rootlets, to decompose and assimilate the
component parts of the soil.

They will experiment.... But let us stop here, or we shall enter into
the realm of fancy. Let us remain in the reality of acquired facts. With
the processes of culture in use, applied on a large scale, and already
victorious in the struggle against industrial competition, we can give
ourselves ease and luxury in return for agreeable work. The near future
will show what is practical in the processes that recent scientific
discoveries give us a glimpse of. Let us limit ourselves at present to
opening up the new path that consists in _the study of the needs of man,
and the means of satisfying them_.

The only thing that may be wanting to the Revolution is the boldness of
initiative.

With our minds already narrowed in our youth and enslaved by the past in
our mature age, we hardly dare to think. If a new idea is
mentioned--before venturing on an opinion of our own, we consult musty
books a hundred years old, to know what ancient masters thought on the
subject.

It is not food that will fail, if boldness of thought and initiative are
not wanting to the revolution.

Of all the great days of the French Revolution, the most beautiful, the
greatest, was the one on which delegates who had come from all parts of
France to Paris, worked all with the spade to plane the ground of the
Champ de Mars, preparing it for the fete of t