3io LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

Northern into the Southern Hemisphere and had invented cold storage
and expeditious means of transport, any vegetable, fruit, or flower could
be purchased at any season by any members of the public who had the
money to make an 'effective demand' for it. A still more signal triumph
of Man over Physical Nature was Western Man's discovery of ways and
means for growing crops out of season without having to resort to the
opposite hemisphere in order to perform this agricultural sleight of hand.
He had learnt how to supplement the natural heat and light of the Sun by
artificial lighting and heating; and this had also enabled him to push the
cultivation of particularly valuable crops into colder latitudes than these
could have braved in a state of nature without human nursing. Western
Man's ingenuity had covered the irrigated lowlands of Southern Cali-
fornia with a pall of 'smog* rising from a myriad frost-averting 'smudge-
pots* interspersed among the ranks of many times their own number of
orange trees, while in the Connecticut Valley it had covered the tobacco-
plantations with acres of gauze to serve the same purpose of screening
them from the blighting touch of winter. Perhaps the greatest of all such
agricultural tours deforce was the all-year-round production of southern
fruits on the fringe of the Arctic Circle in an Iceland which had been
transformed from a bleak wilderness into a market garden under glass
through the tapping of an inexhaustible natural source of hot water
welling up from a thousand geysers.

The Emancipation of a Psychological Business Cycle from a Physical Crop

Cycle by the Industrial Revolution

The familiar annual round was possibly not the only astronomical cycle
to which the Earth's flora was subject and to which Man was therefore
indirectly enslaved in so far as he was dependent on Agriculture for
winning his means of subsistence. The researches of latter-day Western
meteorologists had brought to light indications of the currency of
weather-cycles with a longer Time-span than the period of a single year.
In an investigation of the eruptions of the Nomads out of 'the Desert'
into 'the Sown' we have found some indirect evidence—in the shape of
oscillations in the Balance of Power between the Nomads and their
sedentary rivals in disputable borderlands—for the currency of a cycle
with a span of as many as six hundred years, made up of two alternating
bouts of humidity and aridity.1 This inferential six-hundred-years-long
climatic cycle was, however, at the time of writing, probably farther from
being substantiated than were certain other apparent cycles of the same
class, with wave-lengths running only into double or single figures
reckoned in years, which had been descried by meteorologists in periodi-
cal fluctuations of the yield, not of the natural grasses of the Steppe
on which the Nomad pastured his flocks and herds, but of the crops
artificially sown and harvested by the husbandman in his cultivated
fields.2 The approximate correspondence in dates of peaks and troughs,

1 See III. iii. 395-454.

* See Huntington, E.: Mainsprings of , Civilisation (New York 1945, Wiley), p. 460,
fig- 57: 'Cycles in Wheat Prices for Three Centuries (after Beveridge) and in Weather
for a Century in Europe (after Brunt and others).' According to Huntington, ibid., 'the