Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

The industries will always find some advantages in being grouped, to some extent, according to the natural features of separate regions.

Why, in a rationally organised society, ought London to remain a great centre for the jam and preserving trade, and manufacture umbrellas for nearly the whole of the United Kingdom?

There is no reason whatever why the mantles which are worn by English ladies should be sewn at Berlin and in Whitechapel, instead of in Devonshire or Derbyshire.

Why should Paris refine sugar for almost the whole of France?

Why should one-half of the boots and shoes used in the United States be manufactured in the 1,500 workshops of Massachusetts?

There is absolutely no reason why these and like anomalies should persist.

The industries must be scattered all over the world; and the scattering of industries amidst all civilised nations will be necessarily followed by a further scattering of factories over the territories of each nation.

In the course of this evolution, the natural produce of each region and its geographical conditions certainly will be one of the factors which will determine the character of the industries going to develop in this region.

We begin to understand that, all taken, it is the intellectual factor--the spirit of invention, the capacity of adaptation, political liberty, and so on--which counts for more than all others.

Agriculture cannot develop without the aid of machinery, and the use of a perfect machinery cannot be generalised without industrial surroundings: without mechanical workshops, easily accessible to the cultivator of the soil, the use of…

Agriculture is so much in need of aid from those who inhabit the cities, that every summer thousands of men leave their slums in the towns and go to the country for the season of crops.

Agriculture cannot be carried on without additional hands in the summer; but it still more needs temporary aids for improving the soil, for tenfolding its productive powers.

Steam-digging, drainage, and manuring would render the heavy clays in the north-west of London a much richer soil than that of the American prairies.

The soil claims that sort of aid, and it would have it under a proper organisation, even if it were necessary to stop many mills in the summer for that purpose.

As to the workers, who ought to be the real managers of industries, they will find it healthy not to perform the same monotonous work all the year round, and they will abandon it for the summer, if indeed they do not find the means of…

Humanity as a whole, as well as each separate individual, will be gainers by the change, and the change will take place.

It implies a society composed of men and women, each of whom is able to work with his or her hands, as well as with his or her brain, and to do so in more directions than one.

It would be most desirable that his followers should rely less upon abstract formulæ--easy as they may be as watchwords in political struggles--and try to imitate their teacher in his analysis of concrete economical phenomena.

In olden times men of science, and especially those who have done most to forward the growth of natural philosophy, did not despise manual work and handicraft.

Galileo made his telescopes with his own hands.

Leibnitz was fond of inventing machines: windmills and carriages to be moved without horses preoccupied his mind as much as mathematical and philosophical speculations.

Linnæus became a botanist while helping his father--a practical gardener--in his daily work.

In short, with our great geniuses handicraft was no obstacle to abstract researches--it rather favoured them.

Under the pretext of division of labour, we have sharply separated the brain worker from the manual worker.

Most of them are not capable of even designing a scientific instrument, and when they have given a vague suggestion to the instrument-maker, they leave it with him to invent the apparatus they need.