tions; and that this applies to towns and cities as well as land. With all their advantages of situation, London and Liverpool, Paris and Bordeaux, New York and New Orleans, would exchange for but a small portion of the labor that would be required to reproduce them, were their sites again reduced to the state in which they were found by the people by whom they were first commenced. Throughout the Union, there is not a county, township, town, or city, that would sell for cost; or one whose rents are equal to the interest upon the labor and capital expended on their improvement.

Every one is familiar with the fact that farms sell for little more than the value of the improvements. When we come to inquire what improvements" are included in this estimate, we find that the heaviest are omitted-nothing being put down for clearing and draining the land, for the roads that have been made, or for the court-house and the prison that have been built with the taxes annually paid; for the church and the school-house that have been built by subscription; for the canal that passes through a piece of fine meadow-land, the contribution of the owner to the great work; or for a thousand other conveniences and advantages that give value to the property, and produce the disposition to pay rent for its use. Were all these things estimated, it would be found that the selling price is—cost, minus a very large difference.

The United States Government has recently made a purchase of many millions of acres, for which it has contracted to pay to the Indian proprietors what appears a very low price; and yet the whole value of that land is due to the fact that our own people have been making roads leading to and from it, digging canals, and building vessels of all kinds, by means of which its products may cheaply go to market. Half a century since, the land of Missouri was equally valueless; and that of Indiana and Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, was little better. Sixty years since, such was the case as regarded Kentucky and Ohio; and seventy years since, it was so with Western Pennsylvania and New York. A century since, the eastern portions of those. States were in the same situation; and the total value of the land of New England, at that date, was probably not as great as is now that of the little piece upon which stands the city of Boston. By slow degrees, the lands

nearest the ocean have been acquiring value, until farm-land sells in some places at two or three hundred dollars an acre; and with every step in this direction, those more distant have gradually risen from nothing to ten, twenty, and fifty cents-then, to the government price of a dollar and twenty-five cents—and then, to ten, fifteen, and twenty dollars; but, rapid as has been the rise, the price that could now be obtained for all the real estate north of Mason and Dixon's line, and of the Ohio, would not pay for one-fifth of the labor that would be required to reproduce it in its present form, were it again reduced to a state of nature.

With every step in the progress of man towards obtaining dominion over nature- towards enabling himself to reduce to his service the forces by which he is everywhere surrounded-there is a diminution in the cost of reproducing the commodities and things required for his use; with constant decline in their value as compared with labor, and increase in the value of labor as compared with them. That this is so, as regards axes, spades, ploughs, and steam-engines, wheat, rye, cotton and other cloth, the reader has had abundant evidence; and that it is so, as regards land, is proved by the fact that it may be everywhere purchased at less than the cost of production.

§ 7. With the decline in the value of axes and spades, there is everywhere a diminution in the proportion of the product charged for their use; and that diminution is always most rapid when the improvement in their quality is greatest. Such, too, is the case with land, the rent of which steadily declines in the proportion it bears to the product of labor; and most rapidly where the march of improvement is most rapid. In the days of the Plantagenets, the land-owner of England took all, and gave what he pleased to his serf. Since then, as labor has become more productive, there has been a steady decline in the proportion claimed by the owner of land, until it has fallen to an average of one-fifth

leaving four-fifths to the man who works it, as compensation for his labor. The movement here, is, as we see, precisely the same that has been observed in regard to the hire of axes, the freight of ships, and the interest of money; and furnishes additional proof of the universality of the laws which govern matter — whatever the form under which it exists.

VOL. I.-12

The error of all the economists to whom reference has been made, and indeed of all writers on social science, consists in this: that, instead of studying what it is that men have always done, and what they now do, in regard to land, they study in their closets what they ought to do, and what they imagine they themselves would do, under similar circumstances. When, for instance, Adam Smith wrote the passage in which he assumed that "the most fertile and best situated lands" having been first occupied, men could thereafter obtain less profit from the cultivation of those remaining, that were inferior in soil and situation — giving that as a reason for the diminution in the proportion of the capitalist that always attends advance in wealth and population; he totally overlooked the facts presented by the history of his own country; all of which show that men have, everywhere throughout its limits, commenced with the poorer soils of the hills, and have worked to, and not from, the richer ones of the river bottoms.

It was natural that he, and his successors in England and in France, should think, that when men had the choice between rich and poor soils, they would, of course, take the former, as capable of yielding the largest returns to any given quantity of labor. Had they, however, reflected that the early settlers of their respective countries had been obliged to work with their hands alone, and had therefore had little power to compel nature to labor for them-whereas nature herself, as exhibited in the rich bottomlands, was all-powerful and capable of manifesting a most determined resistance to their efforts it could scarcely have failed to become obvious to them that it was upon the poor and thin soils of the hills that the work of cultivation must of necessity have been commenced; and reference to history would have enabled them to satisfy themselves that such had been the universal fact.

To this assumption is due that error which has everywhere been made in reference to the cause of value in land; as will be obvious to the reader, when he sees that similar errors must have arisen in reference to all other commodities and things, if subjected to the same course of reasoning. Let us, for instance, suppose it to have been assumed, that nature had everywhere furnished readymade axes, and that all the effort required of man had been that of making his selection between the first, second, third, tenth, or twentieth quality and then examine the result.

Under such circumstances, it might be fairly assumed that the first settlers would take the best-those that would cut the largest quantity of timber in the shortest time and that, when they had all been taken up, their successors would be forced to take the second quality; and so on in succession, until, with the growth of numbers, some persons would find themselves reduced to work with those of the tenth or twentieth class. What now would be the value of those of the first quality? Obviously, the cost of appropriation, plus the difference between the natural powers of axe No. 1 and axe No. 10, or 20; and the more rapid the increase of population, the greater would be the demand for additional. supplies the greater the necessity for resorting to those of inferior power-the more rapid the decline in the average return to labor

and the more rapid the growth of value in the axes first appropriated. The resistance presented by nature being a constantly growing one, the accumulations of the past would be attaining a constantly increasing power over the labors of the present.

Directly the reverse of all this we know to be the fact. Man commences the work of cutting timber with a sharpened shell, and thence he passes to a flint; next, he obtains copper, after which comes iron, and then steel; and with every step in this direction, there is an increased return to labor; with constant diminution in the value of all existing axes, as the cost of reproduction steadily declines. The resistance here offered by nature to the gratification of man's desires is constantly diminishing, and the laborers of the present are obtaining constantly increased power over the accumulations of the past.-In the first of these cases, the value of axes must have been composed of the labor of appropriation, plus that of the natural agent that had been appropriated. In the second, it is the same labor of appropriation, minus that which is economized by the substitution of the gratuitous forces always existing in nature, and more and more compelled to labor in the service of man.

Experience having shown a perfect similarity in the course of action in regard to the land and all the machinery into which parts of it are at times converted, whether axes or steam-engines, houses or ships the isolated man having commenced with poor machinery of production, and the associated one having been en

abled to command the services of that of a higher order. the same results should always follow, as like causes produce like effects. That they do follow, is shown in the fact, that the value of land obeys the same law as that of axes-declining in its power to command the services of the laborers, and enabling the laborer to command its services in return for a constantly decreasing proportion of the increased product of land and labor, claimed by the landlord as rent. Such being the case, it must be obvious that the latter possesses no more power to charge for the labor of the natural agent, employed in the production of wheat, than does the owner of the axe to charge for those of the natural agents employed in cutting timber; and that all that the one receives, is compensation for a portion of the labor that has been employed in reducing the land to cultivation, and otherwise improving it; while the other receives in like manner compensation for his services in mining and smelting the ore, and making the axe. It is population, and the consequent power of association, that enable men to obtain food from the rich soils, and to pass from the axe of stone to that of steel; and it is depopulation, with its consequent diminution in the power of combination, that drives them back to the poor soils in quest of food, and forces them to depend upon the axe of stone where before they had one of steel. With the first, there is a constant increase in the power of man over nature, with decline of values as compared with labor. With the second, there is as constant increase in the power of nature over man, with decline in the value of labor, as compared with machinery of every kind.

§ 8. It may, however, be said: Here are two fields upon which has been bestowed an equal quantity of labor, the one of which will command twice the rent, and will sell for twice the price, of the other; and it may be asked-If value results exclusively from labor, how does it happen that the owner of the one is so much richer than he who owns the other?

In reply to this question, it is easy to show that similar facts exist in relation to those other commodities and things whose value is, by all, admitted to result exclusively from labor. The glass-blower puts into his furnace a large quantity of sand, and kelp or other alkali, and takes from it glass; but the qualities of the