Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Science seldom guided them, and sometimes misguided--as was the case with Liebig’s theories, developed to the extreme by his followers, who induced us to treat plants as glass recipients of chemical drugs, and who forgot that the only…

They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they make the soil themselves, and make it in such quantities as to be compelled yearly to sell some of it: otherwise it would raise up the level of their gardens by half an…

Early vegetables pay best, and in order to obtain early produce not only the air but the soil as well must be warmed; and this is done by putting great quantities of properly mixed manure into the soil; its fermentation heats it.

As to the different degrees of fertility of the soil--always the stumbling-block of those who write about agriculture--the fact is that in market-gardening the soil is always made, whatever it originally may have been.

But now the Paris gardener not only defies the soil--he would grow the same crops on an asphalt pavement--he defies climate.

In the painful work of civilisation he has shown us the way to follow; but the ideal of modern civilisation is elsewhere.

He knows no leisure; he has no time to live the life of a human being; the commonwealth does not exist for him; his world is his garden, more than his family.

Our ambition is, that he should produce even more than he does with less labour, and should enjoy all the joys of human life.

The soil can be improved by hand, but it need not be made by hand.

Home-grown fruit is always preferable to the half-ripe produce which is imported from abroad, and the additional work required for keeping a young plant under glass is largely repaid by the incomparable superiority of the crops.

Such a state of things will not last for ever; and the day is not far when we shall be compelled to look to our own resources to provide many of the things which we now import.

The resources of science, both in enlarging the circle of our production and in new discoveries, are inexhaustible.

And each new branch of activity calls into existence more and more new branches, which steadily increase the power of man over the forces of nature.

Each day widens former limits, and opens new and wide horizons.

We thus see that the over-population fallacy does not stand the very first attempt at submitting it to a closer examination.

But we, who see in each new-born babe a future worker capable of producing much more than his own share of the common stock--we greet his appearance.

We know that a crowded population is a necessary condition for permitting man to increase the productive powers of his labour.

We know that highly productive labour is impossible so long as men are scattered, few in numbers, over wide territories, and are thus unable to combine together for the higher achievements of civilisation.

We know what an amount of labour must be spent to scratch the soil with a primitive plough, to spin and weave by hand; and we know also how much less labour it costs to grow the same amount of food and weave the same cloth with the help of…

And, supposing it is, are we not yet bound to analyse that compound result which we call price, rather than to accept it as a supreme and blind ruler of our actions?

And yet, if we compare the prices of articles of food in France, which herself grows most of them, with the prices in this country, which imports them, we find no difference in favour of the importing country.

There is another feature still more unfavourable for this country: namely, the enormous development of the class of middlemen who stand between the importer and the home producer on the one side and the consumer on the other.

We have lately heard a good deal about the quite disproportionate part of the prices we pay which goes into the middleman’s pockets.

And we may therefore hold that it is not yet proved at all that it is cheaper to live on imported food than to grow it ourselves.

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.