Moving the Mountain
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Paperback
(TheClassics.us, Sept. 12, 2013)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ... now, it has been recovering itself. We increase a little too fast now, but see every hope of a balanced population long before the resources of the world are exhausted." Mr. Brown seized upon a second moment's pause to suggest that the world's resources were vastly increased also--and still increasing. "Let Pike rest a moment and get his breath," he said, warming to the subject, "I want to tell Mr. Robertson that the productivity of the earth is gaining every year. Here's this old earth feeding us all--laying golden eggs as it were; and we used to get those eggs by the Caesarian operation! We uniformly exhausted the soil--uniformly! Nlow a man would no more think of injuring the soil, the soil that feeds him, than he would of hurting his mother. We steadily improve the soil; we improve the seed; we improve methods of culture; we improve everything." Mrs. Allerton struck in here, "Not forgetting the methods of transportation, Mr. Robertson. There was one kind of old world folly which made great waste of labor and time; that was our constant desire to eat things out of season. There is now a truer sense of what is really good eating; no one wants to eat asparagus that is not of the best, and asparagus cut five or ten days cannot be really good. We do not carry things about unnecessarily; and the carrying we do is swift, easy and economical. For slow freight we use waterways wherever possible--you will be pleased to see the 'allwater routes' that thread the country now. And our roads--you haven't seen our roads yet! We lead the world." "We used to be at the foot of the class as to roads, did we not?" I asked; and Mr. Pike swiftly answered: "We did, indeed, sir. But that very need of good roads made easy to us the second step in abolishing...