Now a civilized society exists on an artificial level. The domestic animals which we use are not the ones which nature gave us; they have been brought by the labor and ingenuity of man so far away from their original type that we do not always know what the latter was. The grains, fruits, and vegetables which we eat are not any which nature gave us; we have transformed them out of all semblance to their original types. The clothes which we wear were never given to us by nature; between anything given by nature and the shoes, hats, coats, and dresses which we wear, lies a history of thousands of years of labor, experiment, ingenuity, and caprice. Our houses were not given to us by nature; a modern house has a history thousands of years long when we call to mind the steps of invention and experiment, and the thousand converging lines of discovery and invention of details which have gone to make it. So one might go on indefinitely, but it is plain that the whole environment of a civilized man is artificial. He has cut himself off by his clothes, his house, his fuel, his lights, and so on, from the influence of the natural environment—climate, weather, soil, vegetation—and has made a world for himself on a new plane. The price which he has had to pay for this has been persistent labor and constant accumulation of capital; he has to submit to organization; he has to take a place in the social organization and seek his own welfare as a component in the great organized onslaught made by the race on nature to make her yield the comforts of existence. In doing this he has to sacrifice that liberty which consists in doing as he likes. He has been taught that this liberty is his birthright, and that, together with it, he ought to get ease and comfort; but the man who revolts against society and breaks out of the organization, suffers even
Page:Earth-Hunger and Other Essays.djvu/277
ANOTHER CHAPTER ON MONOPOLY
251
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/Earth-Hunger_and_Other_Essays.djvu/page277-1024px-Earth-Hunger_and_Other_Essays.djvu.jpg)