It is obvious that now, when the capitalist system makes us pay for everything three or four times its labour value, we often spend about £1 for each square yard of a heated conservatory. But how many middlemen are making fortunes on the wooden sashes imported from Drontheim? If we only could reckon our expenses in labour, we should discover to our amazement that, thanks to the use of machinery, the square yard of a conservatory does not cost more than half a day of human labour; and we will see presently that the Jersey and Guernsey average for cultivating one acre under glass is only three men working ten hours a day. Therefore the conservatory, which formerly was a luxury, is rapidly entering into the domain of high culture. And we may foresee the day when the glass conservatory will be considered as a necessary appendix to the field, both for the growth of those fruits and vegetables which cannot succeed in the open air, and for the preliminary training of most cultural plants during the earlier stages of their life. Home-grown fruit is always preferable to the half-ripe produce which is imported from abroad, and the additional work required for keeping a young plant under glass is largely repaid by the incomparable superiority of the crops. As to the question of labour, when we remember the incredible amount of labour which has been spent on the Rhine and in Switzerland for making the vineyards, their terraces, and stone walls, and for carrying the soil up the stony crags, as also the amount of labour which is spent every year for the culture of those vineyards and fruit gardens, we are inclined to ask, which of the two, all taken, requires less of human labour--a vinery (I mean the cold vinery) in a London suburb, or a vineyard on the Rhine, or on Lake Leman? And when we compare the prices realised by the grower of grapes round London (not those which are paid in the West-end fruit shops, but those received by the grower for his grapes in September and October) with those current in Switzerland or on the Rhine during the same months, we are inclined to maintain that nowhere in Europe, beyond the forty-fifth degree of latitude, are grapes grown at less expense of human labour, both for capital outlay and yearly work, than in the vineries of the London and Brussels suburbs.