Feeding the World

I

AT the present moment the position of agriculture in both America and Great Britain presents certain contradictory yet significant conditions which demand the most earnest consideration. That the situation of the farmers themselves is uneasy is indicated by the commissions of inquiry that have been set on foot in each country in the hope of discovering legislative action for the benefit of agriculture, and by the statistics of abandoned farms in the United States and of the shrinking area under the plough in Great Britain. The farmer is not finding his business worth while. On the other hand, the public is restive under the rising prices of food, prices which seem disproportionate to the share which gets back to producer. Yet no one has discovered a method of clipping the toll taken by the dealer and the retailer; and though coöperative marketing is being pressed upon the farmers, and in some cases successfully pursued by them, it is doubtful whether the marginal saving it can effect will fundamentally remove the difficulties of the producer.

In despair the American farmer is being counseled to reduce his output to the amount that will satisfy the home market — a procedure difficult enough in any case, with the fluctuating yields due to season, but impracticable for farmers who are not united in an association that can enforce instructions upon its members. An individual can rarely see safety in limiting his output — his natural tendency is to aim at getting ahead of the average; if, however, he works to cheapen his output, that effort will on the whole be attended by smaller gross yields. Lessened production follows in unconscious response to the pressure of low prices; farmers cheapen and lower their standard of cultivation, abandon the marginal land, or turn it down to grass as in Great Britain. The continent of Europe presents a not dissimilar situation; though tariff walls safeguard the position of the farmers, they are not producing enough food for the needs of the community, and complaints of the high cost of living are universal. Despite poverty and adverse exchanges, European countries are being forced to import foodstuffs; in few cases do the statistics show increasing agricultural production.

In face of these universal complaints of high and rising food-prices, can it be supposed that a general policy of reduced production will solve the difficulties?

Long before the resulting scarcity enables the farmer to satisfy his requirements, the dealers handling commodities that are indispensable, yet in short supply, will have forced up prices to intolerable limits; they, rather than the farmers, would hold the community to ransom, and wartime experience shows pretty clearly the impossibility of disciplining traders without an adverse reaction upon production.

We have to face the fact that food is in the process of becoming scarce in relation to the increasing population of the world. In his Mankind at the Crossroads Professor East has just published a striking exposition of the path the world is following. Populations are continuing to rise and, except in France, at an increasing rate; even the World War has caused no more than a flicker in the ascending curve. Yet where during the present century can be seen the corresponding expansion in food-production? With the exception of the growth of the cultivated area in Canada, there has been nothing since 1900 to compare with the opening-up of the Middle W est, of Argentina, and of Australia during the previous half-century. That was the great period of growth of agricultural supplies, of cheapening food, and we have got into the way of regarding the sources as illimitable and the process as continuous. But new lands are no longer available.

Russia used to be a considerable exporter of wheat and is expected eventually to resume that position, but as far as Russia in Europe is concerned it is doubtful whether the land is able to do more than support the existing population, provided it is adequately fed. Past surpluses for export were often accompanied by need on the verge of famine, and though better methods and organization might result in greatly increased production, it is hardly likely to keep pace with the growth of population. Russia in Asia is a more unknown factor, as are tropical South America and Africa, but we know enough to be able to say that they cannot be organized rapidly for the export of foodstuffs, as were the great prairies of Central North America. The gradual shrinkage of food-supplies relative to the consuming population was becoming evident in steadily rising prices from 1900 onward — a rise which is being again resumed after the wild fluctuations due to war, to boom and deflation. It was significant that even before the war the United States was being compelled from time to time to supplement by imports her production of corn, of wheat, and of meat; it is significant now that the new factor in the market to which some of the rise in wheat prices is attributed is an increasing volume of purchases from China and Japan. Scarcity will not come in a night; for a long time, as the Chicago operators say, wheat can always be found somewhere by scraping the bottom of the bin; but it is only prudent to calculate on a continued hardening of prices and the more frequent recurrence of panic rises, as a seasonal deficiency strikes a market denuded of reserves.

The orthodox economist will say at once that this situation will create its own remedy; under the stimulus of rising prices more people will be attracted into agriculture, production will be increased and the balance restored.

It has already been indicated that there is no new land very accessible; the settled countries possess no potential reserves, as may be seen from the way the United States has been driven to experiments in the reclamation of ‘ bad ‘ lands, with no conspicuous measure of success. Nor as a rule do men who have once taken to urban life migrate back to the country because conditions are more promising; the tide sets always the other way, and if the agricultural population is to increase, it will have to be by its own growth. But here comes another factor into play: if food-production is diminishing, relative to population, so at the same time agriculture as a calling is losing in attraction relatively to industries and commerce.

The drift from the country to the town has been a secular subject of lament, needlessly so in so far as the movement is only the reflection of the fact that the land cannot carry more cultivators in one generation than another, when no change in the system of farming is going on. Son may succeed father on the land, but the second son must move off. There is no real need for lament if increased efficiency, due to the use of machinery, enables the same output to be attained with fewer men; the dangerous situation comes when the migration is caused by abandoned farms or a lower standard of cultivation. Now at the present time agriculture cannot compete with the other industries either for capital or for men, because it has not been, indeed cannot be in the nature of things, subjected to the speeding-up processes that have attended cotton-spinning, steelmaking, or the like. All the world over, the capitalist farmer is not getting the same returns on his investment as is attainable in other industries; his prospects of expansion are poorer, his credit is inferior, and though he may stick by the farm his active-minded sons tend to seek other outlets. Financiers are not looking for farming enterprises, except as an elegant way of losing money in order to demonstrate their wealth. The peasant farmers, or rather their sons, are wondering whether the returns are worth the toil of such a life. Peasant farming has never yet succeeded in maintaining itself when it has been brought into such close contact with urban life that an escape was available.

Lastly, the wage-earners in agriculture are always the worst-paid class in the community. No farming enterprise, whatever the skill with which it is conducted, could earn for its workers the wage rates paid by Ford to his mechanics. In England the son of a farm laborer may be found on the railway, earning twice his father’s weekly pay, though living under the same conditions and doing far less skillful work.

Here lies the real difficulty of the situation, that just when the world is needing increased food-production those very developments of science and organization which have caused population to expand are making life on the land less and less attractive. The town is becoming so much nearer; improved transport, education, the cinema, radio, are all elements in showing the country child the other sort of life and the way to it. Census returns, as far as they are available since the war, would seem to show an absolute as well as a relative diminution of the agricultural population in most of the civilized countries.

II

The only way out of the dilemma is, then, to find some way of raising the level of production on the land already in cultivation, since no great extent of new land appears to be available. At the same time the efficiency of the methods of production must be raised. Indeed the efficiency of the individual has to become such as will enable him to earn returns or wages commensurate with those obtainable in the industries; otherwise men will continue to drift away from the land.

First we may examine whether the level of production can be raised, and in this connection it is instructive to look back upon the history of English land.

In mediæval times the average yield of wheat in England appears to have been in the order of eight or ten bushels to the acre; Walter de Henley explains that a threefold yield will not pay for the cultivation, and his anonymous contemporary says that wheat ought to yield to the fourth grain — that is, eight bushels for the two bushels sown per acre. This, then, was the level of production attained under the open-field system of winter corn, spring corn, fallow, where everything was taken away from the soil and nothing put back. Then followed the enclosures and the introduction of crops like clover and turnips, possible only when the land was in several ownerships and not thrown open to common grazing after harvest. Gradually too, under economic pressure, lands began to be thrown together, and the yeoman exchanged for the typical British farmer, occupying something between one hundred and fifty and four hundred acres — a process that was far advanced by the close of the eighteenth century. Under these conditions, with a rotation that included the recuperative clovercrop and turnips from which to make farmyard manure, — thus constituting a conservative cycle which put back everything to the soil except the corn and meat sold away from the farm, — a new level of production was reached. Arthur Young estimated the average yield of wheat at the close of the eighteenth century as twenty-four bushels per acre, but probably Lawes’s estimate of twenty bushels per acre as the prevailing crop when he inherited his Hertfordshire estate, about 1835, is nearer the mark.

At any rate this new level of production, and the improved farming that accompanied the larger farming-units, proved able to furnish England with food during her first period of industrial expansion and increasing population. From 1840 onward ensued a new development; science began to be applied to the growth of crops and animals, artificial fertilizers and foreign feedingstuffs became available, with the result that by 1870 a new level of production had been attained — of about thirtytwo bushels of wheat per acre. It was not so much that farming-methods had been altered as that the fertility of English land had been enhanced by the fertilizers employed and the plant food that had been transferred to it in the shape of maize, linseed, and cotton seed, grown on foreign soils but consumed on English farms.

At that level of production, however, about thirty-two bushels per acre, English farming has stayed for the last fifty years. Indeed it has fallen away some what, for the arable area has shrunk and the present ploughland is the pick of what was formerly under cultivation.

This arrest in the upward march of the yield from the land was a response to the new factor that became operative in the middle seventies — the opening-up of the Americas and the flooding of the market with cheap wheat and other agricultural produce. The law of diminishing returns came into play; the English farmer could no longer afford to go out for such high yields. He had to cheapen his production, and this he could do only by reducing costs, for such reduction is not attended by a proportionate diminution in yield. The competition that was overmastering the English farmer was not due to bigger crops; it was the United States with an average yield of thirteen bushels per acre or so, Canada with a little more, Argentina and Australia with less, that were underselling the producers of thirty-two bushels per acre. In order to keep his business going the English farmer had to move, not in the direction of bigger crops, but toward the methods of his competitors — cheap if slovenly farming, where the crop was left as much as possible to grow itself.

That a higher level of production is feasible over a great part of the world is easily evident.¹

The potentialities of many American states with richer soils than those of Great Britain are obviously enormous; a doubled production is easily in sight. But as the law of diminishing returns informs us, such increased production per acre can be bought only at an enhanced cost per unit — per ton of wheat or per stone of beef. The cost will be in fertilizers and above all in labor, provided always that the system of farming cannot be changed to one of greater intrinsic efficiency.

On examination of this question of system we find that the greater part of the farming of the world is still done by peasants or, more exactly, on singleman holdings, large or small, where the work is carried out by the occupier and his family with only occasional help in seasons of pressure. Such peasant farming prevails generally throughout Europe and Asia, the exceptions being the great domain-farms belonging, as a rule, to the local nobility. Post-war legislation has in most cases aimed at breaking up these great estates; notable examples of this procedure may be found in Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and the Baltic States. Only in Great Britain and Southern Sweden is the prevailing type the middle-sized farm of one hundred to five hundred acres, as a rule rented, and depending for the actual cultivation on the hired labor of a wage-earning class. In the newer countries settlement generally begins with the creation of large pastoral estates, some of which are afterward put under cultivation as large productive enterprises. But as a rule closer settlement cuts the land up into blocks, into single-man farms of size depending upon the land; and in South America alone is the great capitalist farm the characteristic mode of handling the land. The United States shows perhaps an intermediate state of organization; while the singleman occupier-owner holding is typical, most farmers employ some hired labor, though a definite agricultural-laborer class does not exist.

This peasant or yeoman form of landholding is generally regarded with favor, and many countries have adopted some form of legislation in order to foster it or to repair wastages. ‘The land for the people’ is always a good slogan for politicians; land hunger is the most powerful of all passions to exploit. It produces a stable conservative class in the community, hardworking and broken to labor, always regarded as the most dependable warmaterial. It seems to promise the maximum of population supported by and living upon the land. Families run large and furnish healthy and industrious recruits for the urban population, not excitable or easily moved by class agitation. From the time of Vergil and Horace the sturdy independent peasant has always been the subject of admiration and encouragement by literary men who love to contemplate honest toil and the dignity of labor — in others.

III

But is this form of landholding economic, and even effective in producing food for the community at large? Obviously when pushed to an extreme, so that the land available for each family becomes too small, the surplus of food for sale after the needs of subsistence have been satisfied is little enough. This occurred in Ireland in the congested districts and prevails in India and China to-day, where agricultural populations of two and even three thousand to the square mile hover on the brink of starvation. It is not in itself desirable that a maximum population should be engaged upon the land; in a self-contained community the smaller the proportion of the workers employed in the work of producing necessary food the wealthier the community, because thereby a greater number are set free to produce other items of wealth — houses, boots, clothes, amusements — available for distribution.

Germany 17.6 121

Among civilized nations to-day we may find as much as half the population engaged in food-production, yet that proportion is excessive unless the nation on balance is a large exporter of foodstuffs. East estimates that in current Western agriculture 2.2 acres are needed to support one person; or one hundred acres will support fortyfive persons, of whom twenty may be reckoned as workers. From other data we may estimate that three workers could cultivate one hundred acres of mixed farming-land and attain, under proper organization, the present level of production, in which case only one seventh of the workers would be required to provide food for the rest of the population. In typical peasant countries like Italy or France forty per cent of the workers are engaged upon the land, and as these countries are not completely self-supporting this disproportion of itself would seem to demonstrate the comparative inefficiency of peasant farming. In England and Wales six per cent of the male workers are engaged in agriculture, though they produce only some forty per cent of the food consumed by the total population. This agrees with the previous estimate that if about one seventh of the workers were cultivating the land they could feed the community, provided they had an adequate supply of land. England and Wales could not be fed merely by increasing the proportion of farm workers from six to fifteen per cent, unless at the same time additional land was available. But even on land of the average quality that is now under cultivation one hundred acres could be made to support more than forty-five persons on an ordinary Western dietary, without departure from good normal farmingmethods — that is, without having recourse to the intensive production that is physically but not economically possible. The better-farmed land of England — not the whole cultivated area, but such as under present conditions could be four fifths under the plough — requires no more than four workers per hundred acres and would feed a hundred persons on their produce. This is equivalent to saying that with proper farming only ten per cent of a total population need be ‘on the land ‘ in order to feed the rest.

On the score of efficiency it is often argued that the division of the land into small holdings is attended by an increase in its productivity. This is true, but only on the condition that such division is accompanied by a change to a more intensive method of cultivation. When an Australian pastoral estate, carrying perhaps a sheep to the acre, is laid out for closer settlement, grazing is exchanged for the plough and production increases. Similarly, when a dairy farm on the grass in the Vale of Evesham is cut up into small holdings of ten or fifteen acres, upon which men grow asparagus and other vegetables and fruit, the output from the land has been greatly enhanced, but the gain comes from the change of system, not from the size of the holding. In the same district are other larger holdings, as intensively cultivated as the small ones, and with greater efficiency as food-producers.

For obvious reasons the small farm is less efficient, less economic of human labor than the large one. It is handicapped physically in that the size of its fields does not permit of the effective use of machinery or the orderly disposition of labor. Overhead charges are high; the capitalization of the small farm is excessive. Economically the small farm is a weak unit for buying or selling, and though this handicap has been largely removed by coöperation in countries like Denmark, the handicap still exists. Intellectually the small farming community tends to become hidebound and unprogressive; it is more difficult to carry enlightenment to it or to get new developments of science put into its practice.

It is, indeed, generally recognized that the peasant farmer maintains himself only by virtue of the hard work and long hours he gives to his holding. His day lasts from dawn to dark, and the work of his wife and children is freely thrown in. Moreover it is work of a different quality from the regulated pace of a trades-union laborer; often it becomes toil that ages and does not ennoble. What are the motives that maintain such a class?

Use and secular tradition count for much; in an old peasant community men feel they have a right to a piece of land — something inherent like the right to a ‘soul’ or a ‘vote.’ Then there is the desire for independence, to work without any man as master. There are always men who fit with difficulty into the organized framework of modern life, who cannot function as cogwheels in a machine. To them the peasant holding is worth while; indeed it is a necessary outlet if such men are to be made useful in society. Even where a larger system of farming prevails, as in England, small holdings are desirable as jumping-off places for men with little capital; they are the first rungs of the ladder up which many have ascended. For these privileges and opportunities men are willing to pay — to pay in labor out of all proportion to their immediate pecuniary return.

Given this deep-seated passion among men, cannot the business of food-production be with confidence entrusted to those who are moved by it, provided that steps are taken to allow it full development by facilitating access to the land? If the peasant population is to increase, more land must be found for it, and since there is now little marginal land not in cultivation the extension could be obtained only by taking land from the larger occupiers. We have already given reasons to suggest that this process would not be effective in increasing food-production. Further, it is difficult to suppose that peasant farming will continue to be attractive and that one group of men will be permanently content to work much harder than their fellows.

Viewed historically, peasant communities never appear to have been able to persist when brought into close contact with the town and against the competition of industries and commerce. Such was the story of early Greece and Rome, and later English agricultural history is a long lament for the decay of the yeoman. If peasant farming has been better maintained on the continent of Europe, it is because industrial life has remained more remote; only recently have other alternatives been available, and modern life is bringing them ever nearer. Peasant communities always carry certain seeds of decay — on the one hand the pressure to divide the holdings in order to provide for sons, on the other the land hunger that leads men to mortgage their holdings in order to extend their acreage. Many states have had to adopt measures to preserve the small farms against the economic pressure that tends to absorb them in larger units. It was not so much robbery and oppression that deprived the poor man of his land in England, as the ordinary processes of sale or forfeiture for debt. Nor did the latifundia bring about the decay of the small farms of Italy — they were consequences and not causes.

If the peasant farmer is likely to be inadequate to the task of food-production, what then is the alternative? In some way or other the world must be fed; nor can we suppose that men, attaining even greater control over processes and materials, will consent to let their development be limited by the primitive and unorganized methods by which the agricultural side of the community supplies the urban population with food.

IV

A century or more ago England’s growing population, expanding as industrialism made its first advances, was supported by the increased productive power of the large farms that were being organized from the yeoman holdings. Progress in this direction is still open and is much more likely to provide a surplus of food than attempts either to intensify the production on single-man farms or to add to the number of them. If the peasant becomes prosperous through rising prices, he does not to any extent set out to increase his output; his aim is less to make money than to live comfortably. Nor, as we have indicated, is there much new land available for new settlement and increasing numbers. The way to enhanced production from the land lies in the creation of large corporation farms, working with all the advantages of command of capital to turn the land to its fullest use, organization of labor, employment of machinery, utilization of commercial and scientific knowledge.

The objection that the English farmer, who has already proceeded along this path, has been achieving no great success during this last halfcentury, even though he has been enjoying his land at a noneconomic rent, is not really relevant. In the first place, the English capitalization, effective as it was in its day, has not gone far enough for modern conditions; as an economic unit the average English farm is carrying too great overhead charges. When the farmer’s function is that of manager only, it is not a man’s job to control three hundred acres and to overlook eight or ten laborers, nor can such businesses be expected to yield the incomes that farmers have demanded from them. Secondly, the English farmer during this period has been struggling against the run of low prices due to the expanding farmingarea and to the cutthroat competition of the unorganized peasant farmers. The necessary condition for the industrialized farm is the reëstablishment of prices that will permit of a commercial return on capital and of wages at something comparable to the industrial level, and this condition of higher prices is being brought about by the way the demand is increasing faster than the supply. The unit of farming should be something between two and ten thousand acres of mixed farming, and the management should be a hierarchy of director and assistants such as prevails in any great business. This of itself would present certain advantages, in that capable and educated young men would be recruited for farming even if they possessed no capital. At present farming is too much an hereditary affair; access is limited to young men to whom money is accessible, and the free entry of talent and brains is cut off.

The advantages of the large unit in economic production are various. It becomes possible to survey the area of land under exploitation and allot the varying land to its most suitable use. Large-scale enterprises for the amelioration of the land, such as works of drainage, soil improvement, reclamation of waste, can be undertaken. It is difficult, if not impossible, to secure such agreement among a group of peasant farmers as will enable a joint drainage-scheme to be carried out and afterward maintained in efficiency; small men too are very averse to expenditure on any form of improvement, such as liming, of which the benefits are not immediately realizable. The management, again, can afford such aids to efficiency as a system of costaccounting and with its help can direct the policy of the farm in accordance with the potentialities of the land or the tendency of the markets. Too often the farmer persists in a line of business that has ceased to be profitable, partly because he cannot count the cost, partly because he is not accustomed to consider alternatives. Again, the large corporation farm will have capital enough at its command to equip itself with adequate buildings, machinery, and appliances. More capital is needed in farming; as an example we can see all too many farms on which the buildings will hardly permit of the production of milk of the quality demanded by modern hygiene, yet if there were to be a drastic enforcement of sanitary conditions the milk-supply for the towns would be dangerously curtailed. And as with buildings so with such appliances as machinery and silos — neither has the small farmer the money wherewith to buy them, nor will the size of his business pay for so much locked-up capital.

Similar advantages are attainable in the organization of labor; there is room for specialization, and in all critical operations, such as sowing and harvest, a management that can throw a large staff on to a necessary job at the right moment is strongly armed against the vagaries of the weather. It would be superfluous here to go far into detail. The principles that govern the conduct of other big businesses apply equally to agriculture; farming can no longer be regarded as a ‘mystery,’ dependent wholly on the craft of the individual.

One must not, however, disguise the fact that there are many difficulties in the way before the large industrial farm can become general. Not immediately will there be available a race of managers who are capable of running such enterprises with success. Until some businesses of the kind have got going there are no training-grounds for future managers. However, the economic studies of farming that have been so considerably developed in both the United States and Great Britain within the last few years are providing data and criteria for scientific management. It may be urged again that labor difficulties will wreck the enterprise, that with the difficulty of supervision an adequate day’s work can never be secured when the laborer is not working as one of a family group. British experience would show that this fear is hardly grounded. There is a danger perhaps that if industrialism becomes firmly entrenched in agriculture, and the laborers are organized into a powerful union, standards of hours, overtime, and the like would be set on lines completely inapplicable to farming. Agriculture must have its own special conditions of work; if cast-iron regulations framed upon factory models are imposed, then all forms of farming based upon employment become impossible, as has been experienced in Australia. Probably the best prevention of labor troubles would be the introduction of an equitable system of profit-sharing, a procedure particularly applicable to farming. Not only is employment stable, for men naturally remain for long periods, if not their whole life, upon the same farm, but the work of the farm laborer is far more individual and responsible than it ever can be with the minder of an automatic machine. Profit-sharing may supply just that touch of personal pride and joint proprietorship which is the mark of the good agricultural laborer to-day, but which is tending to fade away under the modern organization of labor.

Overcapitalization may be dreaded. So often has it been seen that when the wealthy man embarks upon farming, his enterprise is crushed under the burden of doing things properly. He calls in a contractor where the workaday farmer makes shift with an old orange box and a bit of wire. But this is just where scientific as distinct from amateur management comes in; the trained director is not obsessed by the idea that he must have the best — he will set off probable returns against costs.

A more serious objection is that the land of most countries is already so parceled out that it will be well-nigh impossible to make up units of the desiderated size. Undoubtedly much English land is in need of reallotting. Boundaries both of farms and estates are capricious and inconsiderate of economic working; in some districts amazing anomalies exist, just as in others hedges and ditches occupy no small proportion of the available surface and, apart from the direct injury they cause to crops, cut the land into fields that are wasteful of time and labor.

How the remedy is to come about, by slow economic adjustment or by legislation, cannot be discussed; if the economic pressure grows severe enough the cure will be effected, just as the far more difficult transition from the common fields to enclosures was brought about a century or two earlier.

The first steps will be the most difficult, because in Britain, at any rate, the tradition is firmly established that no money is to be made out of farming except by the old practitioners in their retail way. Neither lawyers nor capitalists have any confidence in farming as a business, and though money may be forthcoming for joint stock enterprises to grow tea, cotton, rubber, copra, and the like in the tropics, a similar venture in England would find little support. This after all is a temporary phase, the result of the falling prices of the last half-century and of the late development of systematic management and administrative control in agriculture. If the prime thesis is correct, that food prices are rising and must continue to rise as population tends to outstrip supply, the incentive to the entrepreneur and the investor will soon be supplied. The evolution of agriculture toward the large industrialized farm devoted to economic production may be delayed, but it must come, if for no other reason than because it makes the most effective use of man power, and man power is becoming the most expensive item in cost of production. Even in Britain, where the small farm is generally forced into a more intensive form of agriculture and produces more per acre, the production per man — and therefore the surplus for sale — is greater on the larger farms. How soon the change will begin to be operative depends upon the course of prices, but higher foodprices must follow the inevitable growth of population, even if for one unforeseen cause and another they lag behind expectations.

The peasant farmers cannot meet the demand except by increasing in numbers and expanding upon new land, and no extension of the agricultural area is now in sight such as took place during the last half of the nineteenth century. Moreover the peasant population, with its standards of heavy work and long hours, is being continuously unsettled by the increasing proximity of the town, by facilities of movement, and by the growing

consciousness of labor conditions. It can hardly be supposed that Western peoples will ever accept an Eastern mode of life — unlimited breeding, complete vegetarianism, and endless subdivision of the land, with the creation of a serf-like agricultural community, existing on the verge of starvation. They will insist upon their own standard of living and limit their numbers, whereupon the only way of getting the maximum of food-production for the urban population will be to make the individual worker as effective as possible by becoming a unit in a large organization armed with all the resources that machinery and science can give him.