scale in the manufacture of artificial manure, and the manufacture of manure is considered as a chemical process, while it ought to be considered as a physiological one, the gardener prefers to spend an unimaginable amount of labour rather than risk his crop by the use of a pompously labelled and unworthy drug. But that is a social obstacle which depends upon a want of knowledge and a bad social organisation, not upon physical causes.63
Of course, the necessity of creating for the earlier life of the plant a warm soil and atmosphere will always remain, and sixty years ago Léonce de Lavergne foretold that the next step in culture would be to warm the soil. But heating pipes give the same results as the fermenting manures at a much smaller expense of human labour. And already the system works on a large scale, as will be seen from the next chapter. Through it the productive powers of a given area of land are increased more than a hundred times.
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