Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

The fine British workmanship in mechanical arts, the American boldness for gigantic enterprise, the French systematic mind, and the German pedagogy, are becoming international capacities.

So, instead of trying to keep life in the old channels, it would be better to see what the new conditions are, what duties they impose on our generation.

And yet, as soon as we try to find out any argument in its favour, we discover that it has not the slightest foundation, either in facts or in judgment based upon well-known facts.

The answer is plain: merely and simply because agriculture had fallen into neglect.

In short, agriculture has not changed its direction, as we are often told; it simply went down in all directions.

Land is going out of culture at a perilous rate, while the latest improvements in market-gardening, fruit-growing and poultry-keeping are but a mere trifle if we compare them with what has been done in the same direction in France, Belgium…

It is the desertion, the abandonment of the land.

The British nation does not work on her soil; she is prevented from doing so; and the would-be economists complain that the soil will not nourish its inhabitants!

Man is conspicuous by his absence from those meadows; he rolls them with a heavy roller in the spring; he spreads some manure every two or three years; then he disappears until the time has come to make hay.

But how can that land be cultivated when there is nobody to cultivate it?

The land goes out of culture, while the area under “deer forests”--that is, under hunting grounds established upon what formerly was arable land for the amusement of the rich--increases at an appalling rate.

No need to say that at the same time the Scotch population is emigrating, and Scotland is depopulated at an appalling speed.

The land continues to go out of culture, while the problem of the day is to render culture more and more intensive.

Do we not know, indeed, that British crops average twenty-eight to thirty bushels of wheat per acre, while in France they reach only from seventeen to twenty bushels?

But a closer acquaintance with British agriculture as a whole discloses many features of inferiority.

However splendid, a meadow remains a meadow, much inferior in productivity to a corn-field; and the fine breeds of cattle appear to be poor creatures as long as each ox requires three acres of land to be fed upon.

They are well cultivated, well manured, and upon them an average of from twenty-eight to thirty bushels to the acre is obtained; and upon these twenty-five or thirty acres out of 1,000 the world superiority of British agriculture is based.

In other words, nearly three acres of the cultivable area are required to grow the food for each person.

Taking everything into consideration, although the Frenchman keeps less cattle, and especially grazes less sheep than the Briton, he nevertheless obtains from his soil nearly all the food that he and his cattle consume.

It is thus apparent that the comparison with France is not so much in favour of this country as it is said to be; and it will be still less favourable when we come, in our next chapter, to horticulture.

And yet no one can read Laveleye’s masterly work without coming to the conclusion that Flemish agriculture would have realised still better results, were it not hampered in its growth by the steady and heavy increase of rent.

After the war of 1864, which ended in the loss of one of their provinces, the Danes made an effort widely to spread education amongst their peasants, and to develop at the same time an intensive culture of the soil.

The chief cause of these successes are: A highly developed agricultural education, town markets accessible to all the growers, and, above all, co-operation, which again is a result of the effort that was made by the educated classes after…

Everyone knows that it is now Danish butter which rules the prices in the London market, and that this butter is of a high quality, which can only be attained in co-operative creameries with cold storage and certain uniform methods in…

And the division and subdivision--the permanent subdivision--of functions has been pushed so far as to divide humanity into castes which are almost as firmly established as those of old India.