to 73 per cent. The rent has advanced, according to Porter, 150 per cent, or twice as fast, and inasmuch as the produce has augmented, according to Malthus, twice as much as the rent, it has increased four times as rapidly as the consumers.

I have the means at hand, in the statistics of McQueen and others, of showing the facts I desire to establish, in a much more lucid, accurate and convincing form; but I prefer to restrict myself to the testimony of men in high standing in the school of Ricardo and Malthus, and who cannot be impeached for the slightest leaning towards the protective system. Relying solely upon such hostile evidence, I think it has been made apparent that capital in land follows the same laws as that in moveable property, and that with its growth and progress, the gross return, to the activity of labor and capital in combination, is so greatly increased as

1st. To give a larger proportionate share, and of course a greater absolute amount to the laborer.

2d. To give a greater absolute amount, though a less proportionate share, to the capitalist.

3d. To leave a surplus of advantage which accrues to the benefit of the entire body of consumers in the diminished cost of products.

The course of this world is so ordered that no man can monopolize the benefits of the enhanced efficiency of his capital or his labor, but is obliged to share them with all his brethren. It is so, because capital of all kinds increases faster than population-the mass of things to be sold, faster than the purchasers-the sum total of food, materials and tools, faster than the laborers who are to use them.

Few have reflected how very trifling an annual increase of capital is requisite to keep it in advance of population. An advance each year upon the last, of 2.81 per cent will double population in twenty-five years, and this is a rate so rapid as to have been taken by Malthus as the limit of physical capacity. Capital increasing in the same way, at three per cent, or less than one-fifth of one per cent more than population, will double in 22.916 years; and in twenty-five years will amount to 9.48 per cent more than double the original amount. If at the expiration of this period the increase were to be divided, there would be sufficient to give to each of the original members of society, or his representative, 4.73 per cent in addition to his original stock, and to provide each of the new members, equal in number, with the same amount of property, as the old ones would possess in their improved condition. If capital increased at the annual rate of five per cent, it would amount in twenty-five years to 3.38 times its original sum-and upon a new division would give to each member of the doubled society $169 in value in place of the $100 which the original half of their number had at the commencement. If the process continues a second period of twenty-five years, population will have quadrupled, and the original $100 of capital will have swelled to $1,146 74, giving to each person, on a new division, $28 68. If the people of Great Britain and Ireland increased only 73 per cent between 1790 and 1840, an increase of their capital, each year upon the preceding of but 21 per cent, would be sufficient to give to each person in 1840 twice as much as was possessed by the individual in 1790. An increase at the rate of three per cent would give to each one an average of $253 40, where each of his predecessors had but $100-and at the rate of four per cent, would give $410 70.

We think it sufficiently appears from the facts, that capital in the shape

of food and raw material follows the same laws in its distribution as that of other descriptions; and this is conclusive as to the law of its production, or rather growth. For wealth of every kind is distributed not through the process of division, and the assignment and location of parts in different quarters and to different claimants by an independent agent or exterior force, but it distributes itself under the action of its internal law of growth, as the trunk of a tree throws out its branches, and these again twigs and buds and leaves. The difficulty with the Ricardo and Malthus school of economists is, that instead of observing the facts and endeavoring to deduce a theory from them, they have invented an hypothesis to which they are determined that facts shall be made to conform. It is the old error of the middle age scholastics from which it has been supposed that Bacon had redeemed the human intellect. Its followers are so given over to a strong delusion, that they answer the characteristic description of Shakspeare, of which, we have during the past year had so many brilliant examples

R. S. asks, "If food tends to increase more rapidly than population, how is it that capital has accumulated unequally in the hands of a few, and that number rapidly decreasing in all countries?" We have shown by unimpeachable authorities of this very sect, that the number is not decreasing, but increasing, even in countries that have been under the sway of a system of policy based upon this very idea, recognizing such progressive inequality as the inevitable law of humanity, and admirably calculated to maintain and aggravate it" adapted," as the London Times said, on the 24th of September last" to the supposition of a vast difference of classes-a lower class, redundant, necessitous, ignorant and manageable; an upper class, wealthy, exclusive, united and powerful; and a middle class, struggling to emerge from the lower and attach itself to the upper." "If food tends to increase more rapidly than population," asks R. S., "what gives capital a continually increasing power over the wages of labor?" It has been shown that labor is more and more emancipating itself with the progress of population and capital. The questions both concede that if the assumed facts for which they require an explanation, do not exist, then food does tend to increase more rapidly than its consumers.

The contrary hypothesis, as we have seen, rests upon the notion of "the inevitable necessity under which we are placed, of "resorting to poorer soils to obtain raw produce as society advances." It certainly was a plausible figment of the imagination, that men in the first instance appropriate the most fertile soils, and only take the inferior grades into cultivation as they are driven to it by necessity; for forty years the assertion that they did so, stood uncontradicted. Mr. Carey, in the Past, Present and Future, was the first to question it. He established historically that men in every nation with the progress of whose settlement we are acquainted, had planted themselves on the poorest soils, the hill-tops and uplands, at the sources of the streams, and had proceeded downwards, as their numbers grew, and they acquired capital in food, materials and tools, and increasing power of combination to the cultivation of the bottom lands, which yield the largest return to labor. His historical sketch of the progress of cultivation in various countries is so interesting and instructive, that I should be very glad, did my limits allow, to make copious extracts. Those, however, who desire to investigate the subject, ought to possess and study the book. My object is confined to

showing that it is well deserving of study, and that there are no antecedent improbabilities of the truth of Mr. Carey's discovery, to justify any inquirer in declining the investigation. R. S. has himself conceded enough not only to negative such an improbability, but to force us to anticipate precisely what Mr. Carey has proved. The following passage from his article in the June number of this Magazine, is remarkable in several aspects.

"Mr. Carey says, 'In the infancy of civilization man is poor, and works with poor machinery, and must take high and poor soils requiring little clearing and no drainage, and it is only as population and wealth increase that the richer soils are brought into cultivation.'

"In this proposition of Mr. Carey's there is a clear admission of the principle contended for, that mankind will at all times cultivate the most available soils, those that will produce the largest returns for the labor and capital ready at the time to be invested. It is not until labor is changed by competition, and the profits of capital reduced by the increasing price of food, that society can be forced into the expenses of clearing and draining, which in some instances costs more than the land was originally worth."

Now this is such support as Malthus and Ricardo, if they were alive, would emphatically decline. They assert broadly that the best soils are first appropriated, and base their entire doctrine of rent, with all its startling consequences, upon "the inevitable necessity of resorting to poorer soils as society advances; •" "the constantly increasing fertility of the soil," which Mr. McCulloch assures us, is the cause of the increasing price of food and of increasing wages. The concession that men will at all times cultivate the most available soils, and that it is not until a late period that they can be forced into the expenses of clearing and draining, completely oversets the theory. It is manifestly the soils which require clearing, because they bear heavy trees, that will bear the heaviest crops, and it is the light and sandy soils through which the water will sink, or the rocky hillsides from which it runs off, that require no draining.

In the long settled countries of Europe it is not so strange that the fact should have escaped remark, but in our country, where the process of settlement is going on every day under our eyes, it is easy to make the necessary observations. The contrast between our country roads, nearly every one of which seems to have been laid out with the design to go over the top of every hill lying near their course, and our railroads and canals, which necessarily pursue the levels and the valleys of the streams, indicate the course of cultivation in the elder states with great precision, and in a striking way. We first go where the houses of the original settlers were located. Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, in her recently published "Travels in the United States," notes the fact that our railroads are lined with forests. "Railroads in the United States," she says, 66 are not like railroads in other countries, for they fly plunging through the deep umbrageous recesses of these vastly, widely spreading woods." If I mistake not, Lyell, the geologist, makes the same statement, and it is a familar remark, that we see the least cultivated portions of the country on a railroad jaunt.

R. S. has not deemed it worth while to read Carey's works. They have attracted the attention and high commendation of the most distinguished economists in Europe, and have been made the subject of extended review and discussion in several languages. They have been made text-books in foreign universities. Within a few weeks Sciologa, the most eminent Italian Economist, in a new edition of his own Lectures, has put them in the list of

the few great works which every scholar in Political Economy must study. They are widely and earnestly studied in France, where great interest has been given to his views and reasoning, from their having been repeatedly employed by Bastial in various pamphlets directed against the multiform schemes of social and industrial reorganization, which have been presented since the revolution of 1848, to say nothing of the book on which his reputation mainly rests, the Harmonies Economique, which was a wholesale appropriation of Carey's ideas without acknowledgment. It was this book, by the way, of which the New York Evening Post, in announcing the forthcoming of a second edition at Paris, said, last August, "It embodies the whole doctrine of free trade in its most comprehensive yet compendious form." Its doctrines are precisely those which I have attempted to defend in the first part of this article. Öne of its editors, (for the second edition was left in an unfinished state by Bastial at his death,) M. de Fontenay, in an article published in Journal des Economistes for October, makes an argument against the Ricardo theory of rent, of which he says, "This capital refutation of Ricardo's theory was first indicated to me by Bastial, who, as I believe, had borrowed it from Carey." I might have said, therefore, that all the views which I am setting forth were entertained by Bastial, and, according to the highest authorities, coincide wlth "the whole doctrine of free trade." The views of Carey on the subject of rent, occupied, a few months ago, an entire session of the Society of Political Economy at Paris, and are the subject of discussion for the next prize-medal of the Politico-Economical department of the French Academy. These things are mentioned to show that though an American writer cannot sacrifice so much time as to read the works of his countryman, the founder of an American school, yet authors of the highest distinction abroad feel themselves under a necessity of doing it.

If men constantly proceed from the light and poor soils, which are most available in the poverty of machinery and labor, to those which are more fertile, as the growth of population and capital render them available, it is plain there is no room for the idea of production diminishing its ratio to the con

sumers.

Malthus and McCulloch both found it upon the notion of a fundamental distinction between agricultural, commercial and manufacturing industry, consisting in this, that "in manufactures the worst machinery is first set in motion, and every day its powers are improved by new inventions," while "in agriculture, on the contrary, the best machinery, that is the best soils, are first brought under cultivation, and man is forced to proceed to the use of inferior machinery."

If Carey is right, agricultural production tends to become larger and cheaper even if we look only to what Ricardo styles "the original and indestructible powers of the soil." But there is another and very important element, which I propose to present in the language of another free-trade writer, in the North British Review for November, 1850, whose article is chiefly devoted to the castigation of a protectionist pamphlet published in Edinburgh by Prof. Low. After stating many very striking facts illustrating the great value of sewer water as manure, among others this: "From every town of a thousand inhabitants, says Professor Johnston, is carried annually into the sea, manure equal to 270 tons of guano, worth at the present price of guano £2,700, and capable of raising an increased produce of not less than 1,000 quarters of grain," he proceeds thus:

"Surely if these well authenticated facts are admitted, it is impossible to overrate their practical importance. They seem at first sight to make neces

sary some reconsideration of the relation between population and production. They suggest at least a reason for suspecting that political economists, when they laid down the law that population increases faster than production, may have been falling into the error of representing the tendencies of fallen man as the normal and ideal laws of the human species. Production ought to increase as fast as population, because any given population would return to the soil the whole elements of last year's food; and in a food-importing country like Britain, faster than population, while, as at present, the yearly importation of food bears a higher proportion to the home produce, than the annual addition to the population does to the census of the preceding year. With respect to agriculture, again, these facts put the consuming population in a new light. They now appear as the producers of the raw material of food, the very manure on the abundance of which all agricultural production and profit ultimately depends, and for which the good farmer seeks by the most costly and laborious processes."

There is much more to be said upon this point than is even suggested by the preceding extract. It considers only the case of a people who not only retain all the elements of fertilization existing in the refuse of their own crops, but in that of their imported food. The policy of those who in this country style themselves the friends of free trade, compels our farmers to export a large portion of the fertilizing elements of each crop, to nourish foreign production. It must be exported unless a market is made upon the land for the products of the land. The importance of this consideration will appear from the statement of McQueen that the value at market prices, of the manure annually used in the British Islands is £103,369,139, or more than the entire value of the exports of British produce and manufac

ture.

To nourish the earth for reproduction, the fertilizing matter contained in all the produce which has been exported must sooner or later be reimported in the shape of guano or artificial manures, or the impoverished soil must be abandoned, because it will cease to support its owner. The worn out and abandoned lands of the southern states, which have been for long years raising crops to be consumed in foreign markets, and have been the main support of the policy recommended to the grain producers, on the score that it will enable them to do likewise, are gloomy illustrations of this truth.

The solitary countervailing advantage which is proposed for the inevitable loss resulting from the deterioration of the soil, is that of buying fabrics produced by low-priced wages and low-priced capital; wages and capital, the low price of which is an indication that they are relatively unproductive, dear and not cheap. Manchester and Lowell both send cotton goods to Brazil and China, where neither has any advantage in point of duties. Manchester paid the least wages and the lowest rate of interest for the capital employed. Both look to the money received on the sale to reimburse the wages and interest; but Lowell is able to do it for less money than Manchester. What does this prove but that labor and capital are cheaper at Lowell, in other words, that a given amount of each produces more cloth. "To complain of our high wages," says Mr. Senior, when contrasting those paid in England with those of the continent, "is to complain of the diligence and skill of our workmen." To the same effect says Adam Smith:

"The liberal reward of labor, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labor are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improve in proportion to the encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence in