food supply of our nation once taken in hand systematically and rationally, by scientists!  All the poor and rocky land set apart for a national timber reserve, in which our children play, and our young men hunt, and our poets dwell!  The most favorable climate and soil for each product selected; the exact requirements of the community known, and the acreage figured accordingly; the most improved machinery employed, under the direction of expert agricultural chemists!  I was brought up on a farm, and I know the awful deadliness of farm work; and I like to picture it all as it will be after the revolution.  To picture the great potato-planting machine, drawn by four horses, or an electric motor, ploughing the furrow, cutting and dropping and covering the potatoes, and planting a score of acres a day!  To picture the great potato-digging machine, run by electricity, perhaps, and moving across a thousand-acre field, scooping up earth and potatoes, and dropping the latter into sacks!  To every other kind of vegetable and fruit handled in the same way—­apples and oranges picked by machinery, cows milked by electricity—­things which are already done, as you may know.  To picture the harvest fields of the future, to which millions of happy men and women come for a summer holiday, brought by special trains, the exactly needful number to each place!  And to contrast all this with our present agonizing system of independent small farming,—­a stunted, haggard, ignorant man, mated with a yellow, lean, and sad-eyed drudge, and toiling from four o’clock in the morning until nine at night, working the children as soon as they are able to walk, scratching the soil with its primitive tools, and shut out from all knowledge and hope, from all their benefits of science and invention, and all the joys of the spirit—­held to a bare existence by competition in labor, and boasting of his freedom because he is too blind to see his chains!”

Dr. Schliemann paused a moment.  “And then,” he continued, “place beside this fact of an unlimited food supply, the newest discovery of physiologists, that most of the ills of the human system are due to overfeeding!  And then again, it has been proven that meat is unnecessary as a food; and meat is obviously more difficult to produce than vegetable food, less pleasant to prepare and handle, and more likely to be unclean.  But what of that, so long as it tickles the palate more strongly?”

“How would Socialism change that?” asked the girl-student, quickly.  It was the first time she had spoken.

“So long as we have wage slavery,” answered Schliemann, “it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to find people to perform it.  But just as soon as labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise.  So one by one the old, dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down—­it will be cheaper to build new; and so the steamships will be provided with stoking machinery, and so the