I
The human race has travelled a long way, since those remote ages when men
fashioned their rude implements of flint and lived on the precarious spoils
of hunting, leaving to their children for their only heritage a shelter beneath
the rocks, some poor utensils-and Nature, vast, unknown, and terrific, with
whom they had to fight for their wretched existence.
During the long succession of agitated ageswhich have elapsed since, mankind
has nevertheless amassed untold treasures. It has cleared the land, dried the
marshes, hewn down forests, made roads, pierced mountains; it has been
building, inventing, observing, reasoning; it has created a complex machin-
ery, wrested her secrets from Nature, and finally it pressed steam and electric-
ity into its service. And the result is, that now the child of the civilized man
finds at its birth, ready for its use, an immense capital accumulated by those
who have gone before him. And this capital enables man to acquire, merely
by his own labour combined with the labour of others, riches surpassing the
dreams of the fairy tales of the Thousand and One Nights.
3 PETR ALEKSEEVICH KROPOTKIN, KNIAZ
The soil is cleared to a great extent, fit for the reception of the best seeds,
ready to give a rich return for the skill and labour spent upon it-a return
more than sufficient for all the wants of humanity. The methods of rational
cultivation are known.
On the wide prairies of America each hundred men, with the aid of pow-
erful machinery, can produce in a few months enough wheat to maintain
ten thousand people for a whole year. And where man wishes to double his
produce, to treble it, to multiply it a hundred-fold, he makes the soil, gives
to each plant the requisite care, and thus obtains enormous returns. While
the hunter of old had to scour fifty or sixty square miles to find food for his
family, the civilized man supports his household, with far less pains, and far
more certainty, on a thousandth part of that space. Climate is no longer an
obstacle. When the sun fails, man replaces it by artificial heat; and we see
the coming of a time when artificial light also will be used to stimulate veg-
etation. Meanwhile, by the use of glass and hot water pipes, man renders
a given space ten and fifty times more productive than it was in its natural
state.
The prodigies accomplished in industry are still more striking. With the
co-operation of those intelligent beings, modern machines-themselves the
fruit of three or four generations of inventors, mostly unknown-a hundred
men manufacture now the stuff to provide ten thousand persons with cloth-
ing for two years. In well-managed coal mines the labour of a hundred min-
ers furnishes each year enough fuel to warm ten thousand families under
an inclement sky. And we have lately witnessed the spectacle of wonderful
cities springing up in a few months for international exhibitions, without
interrupting in the slightest degree the regular work of the nations.
And if in manufactures as in agriculture, and as indeed through our whole
social system, the labour, the discoveries, and the inventions of our ancestors
profit chiefly the few, it is none the less certain that mankind in general, aided
by the creatures of steel and iron which it already possesses, could already
procure an existence of wealth and ease for every one of its members.
4 PETR ALEKSEEVICH KROPOTKIN, KNIAZ
