Likewise in every orthodox college the student is taught what his professors are pleased to call "the law of diminishing returns of agriculture." That is to say, additional labor expended upon a plot of land does not result in an equal increase of produce, and the increase grows less, until finally you come to a time when no matter how much labor you expend, you can get no more produce from that plot of land. All professors teach this, because fifty years ago it was true, and since that time it has not occurred to any professor of political science to visit a farm. And all the while, out in the suburbs of the city where the college is located, market gardeners are
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practicing on an enormous scale a new system of intensive agriculture which makes the "law of diminishing returns" a foolish joke. As Kropotkin shows in his book, "Fields, Factories and Workshops," the modern intensive gardener, by use of glass and the chemical test-tube, has developed an entirely new science of plant raising. He is independent of climate, he makes his own climate; he is independent of the defects of the soil, he would just as soon start from nothing and make his soil upon an asphalt pavement. By doubling his capital investment he raises, not twice as much produce, but ten times as much. If his methods were applied to the British Isles, he could raise sufficient produce on this small surface to feed the population of the entire globe.
So we see that by simple and entirely harmless devices man is in position to restrict or to increase population as he sees fit. Also he is in position to raise food and produce the necessities of life for a hundred or thousand times as many people as are now on the earth. But superstition ordains involuntary parenthood, and capitalism ordains that land shall be held out of use for speculation, or shall be exploited for rent! And this is done in the name of "nature"--that old nature of the "tooth and claw," whose ancient plan it is "that they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who can"; that ancient nature which has been so entirely suppressed and supplanted by civilized man, and which survives only as a ghost, a skeleton to be resurrected from the tomb, for the purpose
of frightening the enslaved. When a predatory financier wishes a fur overcoat to protect himself from the cold, or when he hires
a masseur to keep up the circulation of his blood, you do not find him troubling himself about the laws of "nature"; never will he mention this old scarecrow, except when he is trying to persuade the workers of the world to go on paying him tribute for the use of the natural resources of the earth!
CHAPTER VI
MAN THE REBEL
(Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, in which man finds himself, and how he can advance to a securer condition.) In the state of nature you find every creature living a precarious existence, incessantly beset by enemies; and the creature survives
only so long as it keeps itself at the top of its form. The result is the maintenance of the type in its full perfection, and, under the competitive pressure, a gradual increase of its powers. Excepting when sudden eruptions of natural forces occur, every creature is perfectly provided with a set of instincts for all emergencies; it is in harmonious relationship to its environment, it knows how to do what it has to do, and even its fears and its pains serve for its protection. But now comes man and overthrows this state of nature, abolishes the competitive struggle, and changes at his own insolent will both his environment and his reaction thereto.
Man's changes are, in the beginning, all along one line; they are for his own greater comfort, the avoidance of the inconveniences of nature and the stresses of the competitive struggle. In a state of nature there are no fat animals, but in civilization there are not merely fat animals, but fat men to eat the fat animals. In a state of nature no animal loafs very long; it has to go out and hunt its food again. But man, by his superior cunning, compels the animals to work for him, and also his fellow men. So he produces unlimited wealth for himself; not merely can he eat and drink and sleep all he wants, but he builds a whole elaborate set of laws and moral customs and religious codes about this power, he invents manners and customs and literatures and arts, expressive of his superiority to nature and to his fellow men, and of his ability to enslave and exploit them. So he destroys for his imperious self the beneficent guardianship which nature had maintained over him; he develops a thousand complicated diseases, a thousand monstrous abnormalities of body and mind and spirit. And each one of these diseases and abnormalities is a new life of its own; it develops a body of knowledge, a science, and perhaps an art; it becomes the means of life, the environment and the determining destiny of thousands, perhaps millions, of human beings. So continues the growth of the colossal structure which we call civilization--in part still healthy and progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer.
What is to be done about this cancer? First of all, it must be diagnosed, the extent of it precisely mapped out and the causes of it determined. Man, the rebel, has rejected his mother nature, and has lost and for the most part forgotten the instincts with which she provided him. He has destroyed the environment which, however harsh to the individual, was beneficent to the race, and has set up in the place of it a gigantic pleasure-house, with talking machines and moving pictures and soda fountains and manicure parlors and "gents' furnishing establishments."
Shall we say that man is to go back to a state of nature, that he shall no longer make asylums for the insane and homes for the defective, eye-glasses for the astigmatic and malted milk for the dyspeptic? There are some who preach that. Among the multitude of strange books and pamphlets which come in my mail, I found the other day a volume from England, "Social Chaos and the Way Out," by Alfred Baker Read, a learned and imposing tome of 364 pages, wherein with all the paraphernalia of learning it is gravely maintained that the solution for the ills of civilization is a return to the ancient Greek practice of infanticide. Every child at birth is to be examined by a committee of physicians, and if it is found to possess any defect, or if the census has established that there are enough babies in the world for the present, this baby shall be mercifully and painlessly asphyxiated. You might think that this is a joke, after the fashion of Swift's proposal for eating the children of famine-stricken Ireland. I have spent some time examining this book before I risk committing myself to the statement that it is the work of a sober scientist, with no idea whatever of fun.
If we are going to think clearly on this subject, the first point we have to understand is that nature has nothing to do with it. We can-not appeal to nature, because we are many thousands of years beyond her sway. We left her when the first ape came down from the treetop and fastened a sharp stone in the end of his club; we bade irrevocable good-bye to her when the first man kept himself from freezing and altered his diet by means of fire. Therefore, it is no argument to say that this, that, or the other remedy is "unnatural." Our choice will lie among a thousand different courses, but the one thing we may be sure of is that none of them will be "natural." Bairnsfather, in one of his war cartoons, portrays a British officer on leave, who got homesick for the trenches and went out into the
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garden and dug himself a hole in the mud and sat shivering in the rain all night. And this amuses us vastly; but we should be even more amused if any kind of reformer, physician, moralist, clergyman or legislator should suggest to us any remedy for our ills that was really "according to nature."
Civilized man, creature of art and of knowledge, has no love for nature except as an object for the play of his fancy and his wit. He means to live his own life, he means to hold himself above nature with all his powers. Yet, obviously, he cannot go on accumulating diseases, he cannot give his life-blood to the making of a cancer while his own proper