The Conquest of Bread - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

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

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