of whether right is derived from convention or compulsion; but as regards individual property as such no alteration is thereby made. But Kropotkin's "economics of the heap" (_la mise au tas, la prise au tas_) has another fault besides this matter of logic. Its talented inventor proceeds from two assumptions, which characterise him as a Utopian of the first water; on the one hand the old and incorrect assumption of the inexhaustible productivity of the earth, and on the other the assumption of the innate solidarity of mankind. Kropotkin maintains that production now already outweighs consumption, and that the former is growing with unsuspected rapidity together with scientific insight into the methods of production and with freedom of production. A piece of land which to-day is cultivated by ten persons, and feeds one hundred, would with rational cultivation feed one thousand people, and with the general employment of machinery would only require five persons to cultivate it. In fact, diminution of labour, with increase of production under rational cultivation, is perhaps the quintessence of Kropotkin's argument. Men will then quickly leave the less productive countries to settle in the most suitable and most productive districts, and from these they will extract with proportionately little labour a never-ending superfluity, so that the economic arrangement proposed by Kropotkin will become not only possible, but there will even be too much to distribute. Here again we have the Land of Idleness in the disguise of science, the millennium of the revolution. Let us listen to the description of this return to Paradise in Kropotkin's own words: