days and hours need be given, under proper culture, for growing man’s food. For improving our methods of culture to that extent, we surely need not divide the land into one-acre plots, and attempt to grow what we are in need of by everyone’s separate individual exertions, on everyone’s separate plot with no better tools than the spade; under such conditions we inevitably should fail. Those who have been so much struck with the wonderful results obtained in the _petite culture_, that they go about representing the small culture of the French peasant, or _maraîcher_, as an ideal for mankind, are evidently mistaken. They are as much mistaken as those other extremists who would like to turn every country into a small number of huge Bonanza farms, worked by militarily organised “labour battalions.” In Bonanza farms human labour is certainly reduced, but the crops taken from the soil are far too small, and the whole system is robbery-culture, taking no heed of the exhaustion of the soil. This is why the Bonanza farms have disappeared from their former home, Ohio; and when I crossed part of this State in 1901 I saw its plains thickly dotted with medium-sized farms, from 100 to 200 acres, and with windmills pumping water for the orchards and the vegetable gardens. On the other side, in the spade culture, on isolated small plots, by isolated men or families, too much human labour is wasted, even though the crops are heavy; so that real economy--of both space and labour--requires different methods, representing a combination of machinery work with hand work. In agriculture, as in everything else, associated labour is the only reasonable solution. Two hundred families of five persons each, owning five acres per family, having no common ties between the families, and compelled to find their living, each family on its five acres, almost certainly would be an economical failure. Even leaving aside all _personal_ difficulties resulting from different education and tastes and from the want of knowledge as to what has to be done with the land, and admitting for the sake of argument that these causes do not interfere, the experiment would end in a failure, merely for _economical_, for _agricultural_ reasons. Whatever improvement upon the present conditions such an organisation might be, that improvement would not last; it would have to undergo a further transformation or disappear. But the same two hundred families, if they consider themselves, say, as tenants of the nation, and treat the thousand acres as a common tenancy--again leaving aside the _personal_ conditions--would have, economically speaking, from the point of view of the agriculturist, every chance of succeeding, _if they know what is the best use to make of that land_.