Chapter XXVIII: Summer Colonies For City People CHAPTER I MAKING A LIVING--WHERE AND HOW By thought and courage, we can help ourselves to own a home, surrounded by acres of fruit and vegetables, flowers and poultry, and learn the best methods so as to insure success. In olden times any one could "farm," but it is necessary to-day to teach people to obtain a livelihood directly from the earth. Scientific methods of agriculture have revealed possibilities in the soil that make farming the most fascinating occupation known to man. People in every city are longing for the freedom of country life, yet hesitate to enter into its liberty because no one points the way. Most sociologists are agreed that the great problem of our day is to stop the drift of population toward the cities. Seeing the overcrowding, the want and misery of our great towns, the philanthropist chimes in with "Get the people to the country, that is the need." But there is no such need. Man is a social animal, he naturally goes in flocks, he earns more and learns more in crowds. To transport him to the country, even if he would stay, which happily he won't, would be to doctor a symptom. As in typhoid, what is needed is not to suppress the fever, that is easy, but to remove the cause of it. It is not the growth of the cities that we want to check, but the needless want and misery in the cities, and this can be done by restoring the natural condition of living, and among other things, by showing that it is easier and making it more attractive to live in comfort on the outskirts of the city as producers, than in the slums as paupers. We know already that the natural and healthy life is, that in the sweat of our faces we should eat bread. We observe that everything we eat or use or make comes from the earth by labor; but no one knows how abundantly the Mother can supply her children. It is well said that no man yet knows the capacity of a square yard of earth. The farmer thinks that he has done well if he gets a hundred and fifty or two hundred bushels of potatoes from an acre; he does not know that others have gotten 1284 bushels. ("Mr. Knight, whose name is well known to every horticulturist in England, Once dug out of his fields no less than 1284 bushels of potatoes, or thirty-four tons and nine hundreds weight (about 34 bushels to the ton), on a single acre; and at a recent competition in Minnesota, 1120 bushels, or thirty tons, could be ascertained as having been grown on one acre." P. Kropotkin's "Fields, Factories and Workshops," page 114.) Let us realize what an acre means. An acre is a square about 209 feet each way, 4840 square yards of land. A New York City avenue block is about 200 feet long from house corner to house corner. It has eight city lots 25 X 100 in its front; about double that space (17-2/5 lots) makes an acre. An ordinary one-horse cart holds twenty bushels, so then a full crop of potatoes from that space would fill 56 carts.