The Conquest of Bread (Paperback)

Paperback. IThe human race has travelled a long way, since those remote ages when menfashioned their rude implements of flint and lived on the precarious spoilsof hunting, leaving to their children for their only heritage a shelter beneaththe rocks, some poor utensils-and Nature, vast, unknown, and terrific, withwhom they had to fight for their wretched existence.During the long succession of agitated ageswhich have elapsed since, mankindhas nevertheless amassed untold treasures. It has cleared the land, dried themarshes, hewn down forests, made roads, pierced mountains; it has beenbuilding, 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 manfinds at its birth, ready for its use, an immense capital accumulated by thosewho have gone before him. And this capital enables man to acquire, merelyby his own labour combined with the labour of others, riches surpassing thedreams of the fairy tales of the Thousand and One Nights.3 PETR ALEKSEEVICH KROPOTKIN, KNIAZThe 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 returnmore than sufficient for all the wants of humanity. The methods of rationalcultivation 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 maintainten thousand people for a whole year. And where man wishes to double hisproduce, to treble it, to multiply it a hundred-fold, he makes the soil, givesto each plant the requisite care, and thus obtains enormous returns. Whilethe hunter of old had to scour fifty or sixty square miles to find food for hisfamily, the civilized man supports his household, with far less pains, and farmore certainty, on a thousandth part of that space. Climate is no longer anobstacle. When the sun fails, man replaces it by artificial heat; and we seethe 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 rendersa given space ten and fifty times more productive than it was in its naturalstate.The prodigies accomplished in industry are still more striking. With theco-operation of those intelligent beings, modern machines-themselves thefruit of three or four generations of inventors, mostly unknown-a hundredmen 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 underan inclement sky. And we have lately witnessed the spectacle of wonderfulcities springing up in a few months for international exhibitions, withoutinterrupting in the slightest degree the regular work of the nations.And if in manufactures as in agriculture, and as indeed through our wholesocial system, the labour, the discoveries, and the inventions of our ancestorsprofit chiefly the few, it is none the less certain that mankind in general, aidedby the creatures of steel and iron which it already possesses, could alreadyprocure an existence of wealth and ease for every one of its members.4 PETR ALEKSEEVICH KROPOTKIN, KNIAZ As humanity masters the forces of nature and accumulates vast industrial wealth, a radical vision emerges: a worl Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…