to constitute the demarcations of an accurate ethnographical map. Were it possible that man could commence the work of cultivation on rich bottom lands, such would not be the case; because as population and wealth increased he would find himself irresistibly impelled towards the higher and poorer lands, ast here is shown:

Mr. Ricardo places his early settlers at the point marked B, being that at which the lands are richest; and where the natural advantages of situation are greatest, because of the proximity of the river. As their numbers increase, they must ascend the hill, or fly to some other valley, there to resume their labors. Directly the reverse of this, as the reader has seen, is what has occurred in every quarter of the world—the work of cultivation having everywhere been commenced on the sides of the hills, marked A, where the soil was poorest, and where the natural advantages of situation were the least. With the growth of wealth and population, men have been seen descending from the high lands bounding the valley on either side, and coming together at their feet. Hence it is that rivers are never found to be the dividing lines of races of animals or of nations.

The doctrine of Mr. Ricardo is that of increasing dispersion and weakness; whereas under the real laws of nature there is a tendency towards a constant increase of that power of association and combination to which alone man is indebted for the ability to subjugate the more productive soils. As he descends the hills and meets his neighbor man, efforts are combined, employments are divided, individual faculties are stimulated into action, property becomes more and more divided, equality grows, commerce becomes enlarged, and person and property become more secure; and every step in this direction is but preparation for further progress.

* Edinburgh Review, January, 1851: article, Devon and Cornwall.

CHAPTER V.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

§ 1. POPULATION and wealth tend to increase, and cultivation tends towards the more fertile soils, when man is allowed to obey those instincts of his nature which prompt him to seek association with his fellow-men. They tend to decrease as association declines, and then the fertile soils are everywhere abandoned; and with every step in that direction the difficulty of obtaining food is increased. Population it is that makes the food come from the rich soils of the earth; while depopulation drives the unhappy cultivator back to the poorer ones.

When men are poor, they are compelled to select such soils as they can cultivate, not such as they would. Although gathered around the sides of the same mountain range, the difficulty of obtaining food compels them to remain far distant from each other; and having no roads, they are unable to associate for self-defence. The thin soils yield small returns, and the little tribe embraces some who would prefer to live by the labor of others rather than by their own. The scattered people may be plundered with ease, and half a dozen men, combined for the purpose, may rob in succession all the persons of whom the little community is composed. The opportunity makes the robber, and the most daring among them becomes the leader of the band. One by one, the people who would desire to live by their own labor are plundered; and thus are they who prefer the work of plunder enabled to pass their time in dissipation. The leader divides the spoil, and with its help is enabled to augment the number of his followers, and thus to enlarge the sphere of his depredations. With the gradual increase of the little community, he is led, however, to commute with them for a certain share of their produce, which he calls rent, or tax, or taille. Population and wealth grow very slowly, because of the large

proportion which the non-laborers bear to the laborers. The good soils are but slowly improved, because the people are unable to obtain spades with which to cultivate the land, or axes by help of which to clear it. Few want leather, and there is no tanner on the spot to use their hides. Few can afford shoes, and there is no shoemaker to eat their corn, while making those which are required. Few have horses, and there is no blacksmith. Combination of effort has scarcely an existence.

By very slow degrees, however, they are enabled to reduce to cultivation better lands, thus lessening the distance between themselves and the neighboring settlement, where rules another little sovereign. Each chief, however, now covets the power of taxing the subjects of his neighbor, and, as a consequence, war ensues—the object of both being plunder, but disguised under the name of "glory." glory." Each invades the domain of the other, and each endeavors to weaken his opponent by murdering his rent-payers, burning their houses, and wasting their little farms; while manifesting, perhaps, the utmost courtesy to the chief himself. The richer lands are now abandoned, and their drains fill up, while the tenants are forced to seek for food among the poor soils of the hills to which they have fled for safety. At the end of a year or two, peace is made, and the work of clearing has again to be performed. Population and wealth having, however, diminished, the means of recommencing the work have now again to be created — and that, too, under the most disadvantageous circumstances. With continued peace, the work advances, and, after a few years, population, wealth, and cultivation regain the point from which they had fallen. New wars, however, ensue, for the determination of the question: Which of the two chiefs shall collect all the (so-called) rent? After great waste of life and property, one of them being slain, the other falls his heir, having thus acquired both plunder and glory. He now wants a title, by which to be distinguished from those by whom he is surrounded. He is a little king; and as similar operations are performed elsewhere, such kings become numerous. Population extending itself, and each little sovereign now coveting the dominions of his neighbors, new wars are made, and always with the same result the people invariably flying to their hills for safety-the best lands

and famine and

being abandoned-food becoming more scarce pestilence sweeping off those whose flight had preserved them from "the tender mercies" of the invading force.

Small kings now becoming great ones, find themselves surrounded by lesser chiefs, who glorify themselves in the number of their murders and in the amount of plunder they have acquired. Counts, viscounts, earls, marquises, and dukes next make their appearance on the stage, heirs of the power and of the rights of the robber chiefs of early days. Population and wealth go backward, and the love of title grows with the growth of barbarism. * Wars are now made on a larger scale, and greater "glory" is acquired. In the midst of distant and highly fertile lands, occupied by a numerous population, are rich cities, whose people, unused to arms, may be robbed with impunity—always an important consideration to those with whom the pursuit of glory is a trade. Provinces are laid waste, and the population is exterminated; or, if a few escape, they fly to the hills and mountains, there to perish of famine. Peace follows, after years of destruction, but the rich lands are overgrown; the spades and axes, the cattle and the sheep, are gone; the houses are destroyed; their owners have ceased to exist; and a long period of abstinence from the work of desolation is required to regain the point from which cultivation had been driven by men intent upon the gratification of their own selfish desires, at the cost of the welfare and happiness of the people over whose destinies they have so unhappily ruled. Population grows again slowly, and wealth but little more rapidly, for almost ceaseless wars have impaired the disposition and the respect for honest labor- while the necessity for beginning once more the work of cultivation on the poor soils

* It is interesting to trace with each step in the progress of the decay of the Roman Empire, the gradual increase in the magnificence of titles; and so again with the decline of modern Italy. In France, they became almost universal as the wars of religion barbarized the people. The high-sounding titles of the East are in keeping with the weakness of those by whom they are assumed, as are the endless names of the Spanish grandee with the poverty of the soil cultivated by his dependants. The time is probably approaching when men of real dignity will reject the whole system as an absurdity, and when small men alone will think themselves elevated by the title of Esquire, Honorable, Baron, Marquis, or Duke. Extremes always meet. The son of the duke rejoices in the possession of half a dozen Christian names, and the little retailer of tea and sugar calls his daughter Amanda Malvina Fitzallan-Smith, or Pratt; while the gentleman calls his son Robert, or John.

adds to the distaste for labor. Swords or muskets are now held to be more honorable implements than spades and pickaxes; and the habit of union for any honest purpose being almost extinct, thousands are ready, at any moment, to join in expeditions in search of plunder. War thus feeds itself by producing poverty, depopulation, and the abandonment of the most fertile soils; while peace also feeds itself by increasing the number of men and the habit of association, because of the constantly increasing power to draw supplies of food from the surface already occupied, as the almost boundless powers of the earth are developed in the progress of population and of wealth.

§ 2. The views above given are not in accordance with the doctrine of Mr. Ricardo, yet, look where we may, there is furnished evidence of their truth. If to India, we may see the rich soil everywhere relapsing into jungle, while its late occupant starves among the forts of the hills. In hither Asia we see the country washed by the Tigris and the Euphrates a land of unbounded fertility, and one that in times long past maintained the most powerful communities in the world-now so utterly abandoned, that Mr. Layard found himself compelled to seek the land of the hills when he desired to find a people at home. Hence it is that ague and fever, the constant concomitants of wild and uncultivated lands, are found to be the universal scourge of Eastern travel.

Coming west, we see the high lands of Armenia to be so well occupied as to give occasion to the continued existence of a city like that of Erzeroum; while around the ancient Sinope nothing is to be seen but forests of timber, whose gigantic size affords proof conclusive of the fertile character of the soil in which they grow. Passing farther west, and arriving in Constantinople, we find the great valley of Buyukdere once known as "the fair land"-totally abandoned, while the city is supplied with food for its daily consumption from the hills forty or fifty miles distant; and the picture there presented is but an exhibition in miniature of the whole Turkish empire. The rich lands of the Lower Danube, once the busy theatre of Roman life and industry, furnish now but a miserable subsistence to a few Servian swineherds and Wallachian peasants. Throughout the