Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

valuable portion of the spoils yielded by the chase; whereas the man who lives in society with his fellow-man, is enabled to utilize not only the flesh, but the skin, the bones, and even the yet undi gested contents of the stomach. The isolated man fells the tall tree, that he may obtain the cabbage which constitutes its head leaving the trunk to become the prey of worms; but the associated man utilizes not only the trunk, but the limbs, the bark, and even the leaves. The few and scattered people who cultivate the poor soils of a new settlement, carry their food and their wool to a distant market-losing the manure, and thus adding the exhaustion of the soil, and consequent stoppage of motion in their land, to the cost of transportation; whereas the associated man saves all that cost, and makes his land richer with every crop. The isolated man wanders over extensive tracts rich with coal and metallic ores, and continues poor; but the associated man utilizes such deposits, and improves his machinery for the production of food — and the more he does so, the greater is the power of further association and further increase of combination. Look to it where we may, we see that as men are enabled to come together, they obtain power to command the services of nature -improving their roads as they diminish their dependence on the machinery of transportation and transporting tons with less effort than had been required for the removal of pounds; although with each successive year they find themselves more and more enabled to compress their raw materials into cloth and iron, and thus diminish the weight of the commodities requiring to be transported.

§ 4. The first and heaviest tax to be paid by land and labor is that of transportation; and it is the only one to which the claims. of the state itself are forced to yield precedence. It increases in geometrical proportion, as the distance from market increases arithmetically; and therefore it is, that agreeably to tables recently published, corn that would produce at market $24.75 per ton, is worth nothing at a distance of only a hundred and sixty miles, when the communication is by means of the ordinary wagon road -the cost of transportation being equal to the selling price. By railroad, under ordinary circumstances, that cost is but $2.40 leaving to the farmer $22.35, as the amount of tax saved to him

by the construction of the road; and if we now take the product of an acre of land as averaging a ton, the saving is equal to interest, at six per cent., on $370 an acre. Assuming the product of an acre of wheat to be twenty bushels, the saving is equal to the interest on $200; but, if we take the more bulky products hay, potatoes, and turnips—it will be found to amount to thrice that sum. Hence it is that an acre of land near London sells for thousands of dollars, while one of exactly equal quality may be purchased in Iowa, or Wisconsin, for little more than a single dollar. The owner of the first enjoys the vast advantage of the endless motion of its products-taking from it several crops in the year, and returning to it, at once, a quantity of manure equal to all he had abstracted; and thus improving his land from year to year. He is making a machine; whereas, his western competitor, forced to lose the manure, is destroying one. Having no transportation to pay, the former can raise those things of which the earth yields largely as potatoes, carrots, or turnips-or those whose delicate character forbids that they should be carried to distant markets; and thus does he obtain a large reward for that continuous application of his faculties, and of his land, which results from the power of combination with his fellow-men.

In the case of the latter, all is widely different. Having heavy transportation to pay, he cannot raise potatoes, turnips, or hay, because of them the earth yields by tons; as a consequence of which, they would be almost, even when not wholly, absorbed on the road to market. He may raise wheat, of which the earth yields by bushels; or cotton, of which it yields by pounds; but if he raises even Indian corn, he must manufacture it into pork before the cost of transportation can be so far diminished as to enable him to obtain a proper reward for labor. Rotation of crops being, therefore, a thing unknown to him, there can be no continuity of motion in either himself or his land. His corn occupies the latter but a part of the year, while the necessity for renovating the soil, by means of fallows, causes a large portion of his farm to remain altogether idle, although the cost of maintaining roads and fences is precisely the same as if it were all fully employed.

His time, too, being required only for certain portions of the year, much of it is altogether lost as is that of his wagon and horses-the consumption of which latter is just as great as if they

were always at work. He, and they, are in the condition of steam-engines, constantly fed with fuel, while the engineer as regularly wastes the steam that is produced-a proceeding involving heavy loss of capital. Further stoppages in the motion of himself and his land, resulting from changes in the weather, are consequent upon this limitation in the variety of things that may be cultivated. His crop, perhaps, requires rain that does not come, and his corn, or cotton, perishes of drought. Once grown, it requires light and heat, but in their place come clouds and rain; and it and he are nearly ruined. The farmer near London, or Paris, is in the condition of an underwriter who has a thousand risks, some of which are maturing every day; whereas, the distant one is in that of a man who has risked his whole fortune on a single ship. Having made the voyage, she arrives at the entrance of her destined port, when, striking on a rock, she is lost, and her owner is ruined. Precisely such is the condition of the farmer who having his all at risk on his single crop

sees it destroyed by blight, or mildew, almost at the moment when he had expected to make his harvest. With isolated men, all pursuits are extra-hazardous; but as they are enabled to approach each other, and combine their efforts, the risks diminish, until they almost altogether disappear. Combination of action thus makes of society a general insurance office, by help of which each and all of its members are enabled to secure themselves against almost every imaginable risk.

Great, however, as are these differences, they sink almost into insignificance, compared with that which exists in reference to the maintenance of the powers of the land. The farmer distant from market is always selling the soil, which constitutes his capital; whereas, the one near London not only returns to his land the refuse of its products, but adds thereto the manure resulting from the consumption of the vast amount of wheat brought from Russia and America of cotton brought from Carolina and India of sugar, coffee, rice, and other commodities, yielded by the tropics of lumber and of wool, the products of Canada and Australia not only maintaining the motion of his

land, but increasing it from year to year.

§ 5. Of all the things required for the purposes of man, the

one tha1 least bears transportation, and is, yet, of all the most important, is manure. The soil can continue to produce on the condition, only, of restoring to it the elements of which its crop had been composed. That being complied with, the supply of food increases, and men are enabled to come nearer together and combine their efforts developing their individual faculties, and thus increasing their wealth; and yet this condition of improvement, essential as it is, has been overlooked by all economists. The subject being one of much importance, and having been treated at considerable length in a work to which reference has heretofore been made, it is deemed expedient to submit for the consideration of the reader the following passage :—

"Every crop is made from matter furnished by its predecessors; and whatever is lacking in the manure will surely, sooner or later, disappear in the product. Exhaustion and renovation must reciprocate in equal measure. If any element, however minute in quantity, is constantly withdrawn and removed from the soil, the product of which it is a constituent must finally cease to reappear. If animals are fed upon the land, their excrements restore a large portion of the inorganic matter, of which the plants on which they feed have robbed the soil. But the richest pasture will, after a time, show signs of exhaustion, if the young cattle that grow upon it are sent to distant markets Let the cattle remain, and their manure be faithfully restored: if they are cows, a considerable quantity of phosphate of lime is contained in their milk; and if this is sent away in its original form, or in the shape of butter and cheese, the soil must cease to furnish pasture which will make milk. The grass-lands of Cheshire, in England, famous for its dairy husbandry, were thus impoverished. They were restored by the application of ground bones-human bones, in a great measure, imported from the battle-fields of the continent which contain essentially the same substances as the milk. The importance of what might seem an insignificant loss to the land, is shown by the fact stated by Professor Johnston, that lands which paid but five shillings an acre of rent, have been, by restoring the bone phosphates, of which they had been ignorantly robbed, made to yield a rent of forty shillings, besides a good profit to the dairyman. Different crops take away the inorganic substances of the soil in different propor

tions; the grains, for instance, take chiefly phosphates; potatoes and turnips, mostly potash and soda; but all crops, natural or artificial, deprive the land of some essential ingredient, and, in whatever shape the ingredient is finally removed, in animal or human muscle and bones, in cloth made from the cotton, the wool, or the flax, boots or hats made from the skin or the fur of the animals, no matter how many transformations the elements may have undergone, the vegetative power of the earth from which they were withdrawn has been diminished to an equivalent extent. Nature is an easy creditor, and presents no bill of damages for exhausted fertility. We are, therefore, little accustomed to take account of what is due to the earth. An idea, however, of the great pecuniary magnitude of the debt may be gained from the fact, that the manure annually applied to the soil of Great Britain, at its market prices, was estimated in 1850* at £103,369,139, a sum much exceeding the entire value of its foreign trade. In Belgium, which sustains a population of 336 to the square mileone to every arable acre in the kingdom which, according to Mr. McCulloch, 'produces commonly more than double the quantity of corn required for the consumption of its inhabitants;' and where immense numbers of cattle are stall-fed for the sake of their manure, the liquid excrements of a single cow sell for ten dollars a year. The people of Belgium are able, by making their own population, animal and human, the most dense of any country in the world, to raise beef, mutton, pork, butter, and grain, cheaply enough to admit of their exportation to England, to feed people who believe in over-population.

"The necessity of taking into account the comparative exhaustion resulting from the growth and removal of different crops, as well as their comparative cheapness of transportation, modifies considerably the inferences which would otherwise be made in regard to their value. A work in which all the circumstances which can affect the economy of different modes of cultivation, are subjected to rigorous mathematical calculationt-the necessary

* Macqueen's Statistics, p. 12.

† DE THUNEN: "Recherches sur l'Influence que le Prix des Grains, la Richesse du Sol, et les Impots, exercent sur la Culture," p. 178. The work is only known to the writer in the French translation, made from the original German, under the auspices of the National and Central Agricultural Society of France.

« НазадПродовжити »