The writer may fail in his purpose with this paper, but he will not have written in vain if he can lead a few men to see the pitiful folly of that half-baked theory which ranks men with the wild beasts of the jungle, and ignores the existence of both science and morality. He can do that, assuredly, with any one whom he can induce to read one little book—Prince Kropotkin’s “Fields, Factories and Workshops.” The book was published nine years ago, but apparently it has not yet had time to affect the cogitations of the orthodox economists. You still read, as you have been used to reading since the days of Adam Smith, that the possibilities of the soil are strictly limited, and that population always stays just within the starvation limit. Nearly all the fertile land in this country, for instance, is now in use, and so we shall soon reach the limit here. The forty million people of Great Britain have long since passed it, and they would starve to death were it not for our surplus. And there are portions of the world where population is even more dense, as in Belgium. All this you have known from your school-days, and you think you know it perfectly, and beyond dispute; and so how astonished you will be to be told that it is simply one of the most stupid and stupefying delusions that ever were believed and propagated among men; that the limits of the productive possibilities of the soil have not only not been attained, but are, so far as science can now see, absolutely unattainable; that not only could England support with ease her own population on her own soil, and not only could Belgium do it, but any most crowded portion of the world could do it, and do it once again, and yet once again, and do it with two or three hours of work a day by a small portion of its population! That England could now support, not merely her thirty-three million inhabitants, but seventy-five and perhaps a hundred million! And that the United States could now support a billion and a quarter of people, or just about the entire population of this planet! And that this could be done year after year, and entirely without any possibility of the exhaustion of the soil! And all this not any theory of a closet speculator or a Utopian dreamer, but by methods that are used year after year by thousands and tens of thousands of men who are making money by it in all portions of the world—in the market-gardens of Paris and London, of Belgium, Holland and the island of Jersey, the truck-farms of Florida and Minnesota, and of Norfolk, Virginia! Prince Kropotkin writes: