Manual of Social Science

tion of the truth of those he previously had published. Here, too, was further proof of the universality of natural laws, the course of man, in reference to the earth itself, being thus found to have been the same that we see it to have been, in reference to all the instruments into which he fashions the several parts of the great machine. Always commencing with the poorest axes, he proceeds onward to those of steel: always commencing with the poorer soils, he proceeds onward to those richer ones which yield the largest return to labor, the increase of numbers being thus proved to be essential to increase in the supply of food. Here was a harmony of interests directly opposed to the discords taught by Mr. Malthus.

This great law was first announced now ten years since.* While engaged in its demonstration, the author found himself constantly impelled to the use of physical facts in illustration of social phenomena, and hence was led to remark the close affinity of physical and social laws. Reflecting upon this, he soon was brought to the expression of the belief, that closer examination would lead to the development of the great fact, that there existed but a single system of laws-those instituted for the government of matter in the form of clay and sand, proving to be the same by which that matter was governed when it took the form of man, or of communities of men.

In the work then published, the discoveries of modern science, proving the indestructibility of matter, were, for the first time, rendered available to social science-the difference between agriculture and all other of the pursuits of man having been there exhibited in the fact, that the farmer was always employed in making a machine, whose powers increased from year to year; whereas, the shipmaster and the wagoner were always using machines, whose powers as regularly diminished. The whole business of the former, as there was shown, consisted in making and improving soils, his powers of improvement growing with the growth of wealth and population. To fully develop the law of the perpetuity of matter in its bearing upon the law of population was, however, reserved for the author's friend, Mr. E. Peshine Smith, numerous extracts from whose excellent little Manual will be found in the present volume.

The great and really fundamental law of the science-the

*The Past, the Present, and the Future. Philad., 1848.

one required for the demonstration of the identity of physical and social laws-still however remained to be discovered; but it is now, as the author thinks, given in the second chapter of the present volume. In the third will be found the law developed by Mr. Smith. The fourth gives that of the occupation of the earth, as published ten years sincethose of value and distribution, published ten years earlier, following, in chapters five and six. The order here required for their proper exhibition is thus, as the e reader sees, precisely the inverse one of their discovery, thus proving the truth of the idea, that first principles are always last to be discovered.

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