If wheat, peas, and all the rest are indispensable to us, our care, by a
just return, is absolutely necessary to them. Such as our needs have
made them, incapable of resistance in the bitter struggle for survival,
these vegetables, left to themselves without culture, would rapidly
disappear, despite the numerical abundance of their seeds, as the
foolish sheep would disappear were there no more sheep-folds.

They are our work, but not always our exclusive property. Wherever food
is amassed, the consumers collect from the four corners of the sky; they
invite themselves to the feast of abundance, and the richer the food the
greater their numbers. Man, who alone is capable of inducing agrarian
abundance, is by that very fact the giver of an immense banquet at which
legions of feasters take their place. By creating more juicy and more
generous fruits, he calls to his enclosures, despite himself, thousands
and thousands of hungry creatures, against whose appetites his
prohibitions are helpless. The more he produces, the larger is the
tribute demanded of him. Wholesale agriculture and vegetable abundance
favor our rival, the insect.

This is the immanent law. Nature, with an equal zeal, offers her mighty
breast to all her nurslings alike; to those who live by the goods of
others no less than to the producers. For us, who plough, sow, and reap,
and weary ourselves with labor, she ripens the wheat; she ripens it also
for the little Calender-beetle, which, although exempted from the labor
of the fields, enters our granaries none the less, and there, with its
pointed beak, nibbles our wheat, grain by grain, to the husk.

For us, who dig, weed, and water, bent with fatigue and burned by the
sun, she swells the pods of the pea; she swells them also for the
weevil, which does no gardener's work, yet takes its share of the