1st. Natural labor directly applied in production.

2d. Labor-saving machinery, or artificial labor.

3d. The resulting improvement in quality and quantity of commodities, agricultural and mechanical.

4th. Improvement in transportation, foreign and domestic. 5th. Substitution of the cheap and abundant supplies for the costly and scarce.

6th. Facilities of commerce-money and credit.

D. Pardon me for forming a pre-judgment of half-finished work. But I am puzzled that, in enumerating the sources of wealth and its elements, you give no place, much less the primary and most conspicuous place, to what economists call "the natural and indestructible powers of the soil." There ought to be some place for the raw material of all commodities, unless you can make your industrial world out of nothing. If "Mother Earth" and her supplies were stopped, I think, your theoretic account of human wealth would have no ground to stand on.

T. That last hit, I own, is capital as a witticism; but what is it worth in logic? Let me, in turn, put a more pertinent question to you: Taking wealth in land property to be its exchange value, can you tell me how much of its price is traceable to "the original and indestructible power of the soil;" and how much is due to the labor employed in its improvement? Take any lot of ground in any of our principal cities, charge it with the cost of all the labor which has given it its present worth in other things, the cost of buildings, with its proper share in the cost of the streets, the drainage, and of the police service, which make a part of its convenience, and therefore of its value; add the harbor improvements, the land conveyances of travel and freight, with so much of its valuable advantages as are found in its churches, school-houses, theatres, market-houses, libraries, hotels, parks, in its immediate vicinage; its shipping and railroads; its gas and telegraph service, and all the social advantages which it has been made to command, all of which are chargeable to the accumulated worth of the premises, and then see what is left of the present market value. That lot, in its natural condition, would not be worth the blanket that would cover it.

D. Land has in itself advantages of situation; for one instance, its neighborhood to market.

T. Labor made that market for it. It has no such advantage to the aboriginal Indian.

D. What do you say of the water-power which moves machinery?

T. Just what I must say of the currents of air which work in human service as the streams of water do when they are captured and subdued. Like the ocean and the atmosphere in bulk, they are latently capable of service; but they promote the growth of wealth just in the form and to the extent that human labor rules their inherent forces.

Moreover, land has no such "indestructible powers" in the composition of value as the economic formula assumes. In the fields long cultivated all that give them natural fertility has been exhausted, and artificially replaced often and completely. Matter, indeed, cannot be destroyed; but its forms and the forces of its atoms do by use become incapable of their primitive services.

D. Would you treat land, and discuss its offices and uses, not as a vital and original force, or body of independent forces, but as a machine?

T. If thorough examination shall make manifest its conditions and its management in use to correspond to those other combinations of materials which we shape and arrange so as to give results of which they are incapable in their natural state, we shall see that an inresident vitality does not take any organism out of the category of mechanics. Machinery, called for distinctiveness celestial, is by all authors and thinkers applied to the movements of the heavenly bodies whose appetencies are innate, as truly as are those of land. There is a mechanism of the human frame and in its offices, such as respiration, circulation, and locomotion; and, as machinery, these functions must be considered, and may be so named, for the purposes of investigation and description.

D. There is, nevertheless, something rather startling in a classification forced to embrace the animate with the inanimate. I have not heretofore been able to see such connection between the substances of a mountain or of a meadow, and of a clock or steamboat.

T. Reflect. The spontaneous products of the soil serve the irrational races without their management; but, to become utilities to man, they must be converted by his administration into

conformable supplies. He removes its trees and grasses, and substitutes his grains and roots; he ploughs its surface and sows the seeds, just as he digs the ores, and smelts and forges them into forms for his use. His instruments are all mechanical, and all their subjects are under its laws in his use of them.

D. Still, the word machine is customarily given only to artificial instruments, commonly consisting of various contributing and inter-active parts, which serve and regulate the intended operations and effects.

T. Well, you have just as accurately described the art and labor of agriculture in its government and modification of the earth's innate powers, and you may, if you must, call the work vital mechanics or terrestrial, or by any other name that does not alter the facts. The struggle from ignorance and feebleness all the way up to maturity of knowledge of, and power over, nature, is a study in the use of the physical machinery of agents, instruments, and subjects.

P. As words are instruments in the communication of thought, it occurs to me now that even language in its modifications of form is in an allowable and useful sense the machinery of converse; that grammar is a constructive system, more like carpentry than Lindley Murray's ideal definition as "the art of speaking and writing the English language with propriety," which, by including lexicography and rhetoric, embraces too much, and confuses the art. He puts the vital or ideal into the purely mechanical properties and uses of words, with the effect of vitiating every one of his definitions of the terms of the art.

CHAPTER IV.

MAN AND LAND-OCCUPATION OF THE EARTH.

T. Now let us proceed with the most general facts in relation to man's occupation and cultivation of the earth, which will embrace both the laws governing colonization or emigration, and the rules in the selection of the kinds of land brought into occupancy and cultivation.

D. The choice of settlements in the various parts of the earth, and the selection of soils for individual occupation and cultivation, may be matters of history, but cannot need the researches of theory. Man is, not like the beasts and birds, limited to special localities. He is cosmopolitan, with the world before him where to choose, as Milton has it, and Providence his guide. It is clear enough that having the means of travel and transportation, he will choose the regions that are the most fertile and salubrious, and, in other respects, the best adapted to his use. Without doubt when land is abundant and population scarce, men will take the best soils and leave those of inferior quality to the next comers; and so on, till the last arable acre and of the lowest quality is, in the end, of necessity taken by the last class in the grades of successive takers. Ricardo founds his doctrine of Rent upon this progressive decline of productiveness of soils. In the nature and order of things this process of individual appropriation is settled, and no other theory than that of choice, limited by opportunity, seems to be required.

T. If in the whole round of speculation there can be found a theory utterly baseless, Ricardo's theory of Rent is that eminent one. In assuming its plausibility you have started a multifold variety of questions, which, I have the pleasure of informing you, have been settled against you by the most conclusive facts that theory can encounter. D. Pardon me. Ricardo's theory of Rent commanded instant and general acceptance. The political economists of reputation have never called it in question. The mere statement of his propositions makes them self-evident. Can there be anything doubt

ful in them? Allow me to state them in their self-supporting array. He assumes that when the quality of land, No. 1 in fertility, is still open to occupancy, nobody will pay rent for any portion of it; but when that prime quality shall have been all appropriated, the next comers, having nothing left them but quality No. 2, will of course pay the value of the superior productiveness of No. 1 for its advantages. Here rent begins, and so on the rent of the superior grades will increase through all the intermediate qualities until, as he states it, No. 7 is reached. The use of each successive quality adding its value to that of the first and all the following grades. Surely No. 7 must pay the difference of value between it and No. 6 if it would make the exchange. The arithmetical progression of numbers is not more certain than this anti-climax of value in land occupation. The very symmetry of the formula seems to carry with it all the harmonies of truth.

T. You have stated the Ricardo doctrine of Rent with sufficient explicitness and accuracy; failing, however, to face its horrid consequences, which both dishonor Providence and threaten despair to humanity; but, waiving all present objections to the moral of the fable, let me call your attention to some very obvious and familiar facts which your theory does not meet or dispose of. The primary fact is that Land in the state of Nature, and open to choice, must be subdued in order to be brought into service. Its forests must be felled, its swamps drained; its mould must be broken up, and the seeds of the required harvest must be sown; and the implements of the clearing and culture must be provided. The liberty of choice is therefore put under conditions. It is not merely a preference founded upon degrees of fertility or other conditions of situation. There must be a calculation of resistances in the selection. The rank fertility of the best soils may demand labor and capital which the pioneer does not possess. The richest of all, which he might otherwise select-the marshes that have drained the surrounding hills of their wealth for ages are in open and obstinate resistance to his very limited resources. In a variety of prepared and perfected commodities a man will choose and take the best for immediate use, because he is not embarrassed by any conditions precedent to the enjoyment, but when there is resistance to be encountered, and acquirement must be the result