The Conquest of Bread

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