obe could be supported on the soil now
cultivated in the United States alone! It is impossible to apply such
methods now, owing to the ignorance and poverty of our scattered farming
population; but imagine the problem of providing the food supply of our
nation once taken in hand systematically and rationally, by scientists!
All the poor and rocky land set apart for a national timber reserve, in
which our children play, and our young men hunt, and our poets dwell!
The most favorable climate and soil for each product selected; the
exact requirements of the community known, and the acreage figured
accordingly; the most improved machinery employed, under the direction
of expert agricultural chemists! I was brought up on a farm, and I know
the awful deadliness of farm work; and I like to picture it all as
it will be after the revolution. To picture the great potato-planting
machine, drawn by four horses, or an electric motor, ploughing the
furrow, cutting and dropping and covering the potatoes, and planting a
score of acres a day! To picture the great potato-digging machine,
run by electricity, perhaps, and moving across a thousand-acre field,
scooping up earth and potatoes, and dropping the latter into sacks! To
every other kind of vegetable and fruit handled in the same way--apples
and oranges picked by machinery, cows milked by electricity--things
which are already done, as you may know. To picture the harvest fields
of the future, to which millions of happy men and women come for a
summer holiday, brought by special trains, the exactly needful number to
each place! And to contrast all this with our present agonizing system
of independent small farming,--a stunted, haggard, ignorant man, mated
with a yellow, lean, and sad-eyed drudge, and toiling from four o'clock
in the morning until nine at night, working the children as soon as they
are able to walk, scratching the soil with its primitive tools, and shut
out from all knowledge and hope, from all their benefits of science and
invention, and all the joys of the spirit--held to a bare existence
by competition in labor, and boasting of his freedom because he is too
blind to see his chains!"

Dr. Schliemann paused a moment. "And then," he continued, "place
beside this fact of an unlimited food supply, the newest discovery of
physiologists, that most of the ills of the human system are due to
overfeeding! And then again, it has been proven that meat is unnecessary
as a food;