On the wide prairies of America each hundred men, with
the aid of powerful 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 re-
turns. 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 vegetation.
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 gen-
erations of inventors, mostly unknown--a hundred men
manufacture now the stuff to provide ten thousand persons
with clothing for two years. In well-managed coal mines
the labour of a hundred miners 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 exhibi-
tions, 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.

Truly, we are rich--far richer than we think; rich in what
we already possess, richer still in the possibilities of produc-

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