§ 11. Steadiness and regularity grow with increase in the variety of commodities to the production of which the land may be devoted, and agriculture gradually loses its gambling character, while the faculties of those who cultivate the land become more and more stimulated into action. The man near to market not only has growing on his farm, at one and the same time, a great variety of commodities, in different stages and liable to be differently affected by the chances and changes of the weather, but he raises from the same land successive crops,* and thus greatly increases the return to labor. With every such increase, he learns to attach a higher value to the powers of nature at his command, and from year to year he economizes them more and more — and thus does economy of human effort lead to the careful husbandry of the forces of nature. †

mention our conservatories, which give at least an imperfect idea of tropical vegetation.

"Again, the infinite variety which arises in races and varieties would not exist without cultivation. We could not feast our eyes on the endless series of roses; we should have to be content with the simple wild rose: the stock, the dahlia, the aster, and the auricula, with their countless varieties, would be unknown to us. And no one will deny the beauty of these objects, or assert that they are not beauties of nature. Here I shall, at all events, have the flower-painter and the ladies on my side. Without cultivation, we should not have the fine varieties of fruits, as of the apple, for the poor wild crab of the woods would be our only fruit of this kind. The same holds good of animals; a handsome Arabian horse, pretty races of pigeons, are certainly beauties of nature."-SCHOUW: The Earth, Plants, and Man, p. 234.

"Four, and sometimes five, crops are extracted from the land in the course of the year. The old-fashioned farmer, accustomed to the restrictions of old-fashioned leases, would stare at such a statement, and ask how long it would last. But his surprise would be still greater at being told that after every clearance the ground is deeply trenched, and its powers restored with a load of manure to every thirty square feet of ground. This is the secret of the splendid return, and it could be effected nowhere but in the neighborhood of such cities as London, where the produce of the fertilizer is sufficiently great to keep down its price. And here we have a striking example of town and country reciprocation. The same wagon that in the morning brings a load of cabbages, is seen returning a few hours later filled with dung."-London Quarterly Review, October, 1854; article, London Commissariat.

"The care and attention bestowed by the market gardeners is incredible to those who have not witnessed it; every inch of ground is taken advantage of-cultivation runs between the fruit-trees; storming parties of cabbages and cauliflowers swarm up to the very trunks of apple-trees; raspberrybushes are surrounded and cut off by young seedlings. If you see an acre of celery growing in ridges, be sure that, on a narrow inspection, you will find long files of young peas picking their way along the furrows. Every thing flourishes here except weeds, and you may go over a 150-acre piece of ground without discovering a single one. Quality, even more than quantity, is attended to by the best growers; and they nurse their plants as they VOL. II.-3

Disease, too, is banished as population grows, and as a market is gradually created upon, or near, the land; and as its powers are more and more developed. The poor laborer of Ireland sees his crop of potatoes perish before his eyes because of rot, consequent upon the unceasing exhaustion of the soil; and the agriculturist of Portugal witnesses the destruction of his hopes, by constant recurrence of the vine disease; while the American farmer is perpetually visited by blight resulting from the necessity for constantly withdrawing from the soil the material required for enabling it fully to supply the everrecurring crop of wheat. The man who has a market at his door finds both insects and blight "banished" from his land "as strictly as from the court of Oberon."* Further even than this, he is enabled, from year to year, more fully to profit by the discoveries of scientific men, and by their aid to free himself from almost all the disturbing causes that heretofore have tended to cause loss to himself and others thus making his pursuit so nearly certain in its results, as to add largely to the value of his labor and his land, and to afford convincing proof that wealth consists in the power to direct the forces of nature to the service of man.†

Throughout the world, and at all ages, the prosperity of agriculture, and the value of land, have been in the direct ratio of the proximity of the market. In the early days of Italy, the Campagna was filled with prosperous towns and cities, each furnishing a local centre of exchange, and commerce then was great. would children. The visitor will sometimes see the heads' of an acre of cauliflowers one by one folded up in their own leaves as carefully as an anxious wife wraps up an asthmatic husband on a November night; and if rain should fall, attendants run to cover them up, as quickly as they cover up the zoological specimens at the Crystal Palace when the watering-pots are set to work."-Ibid. p. 154.

* Ibid.

The manner in which science is daily adding to the productiveness of agricultural labor, and thus accelerating the progress of man, is illustrated in the following passage from one of the journals of the day :

"Recent discovery has shown that remarkable effects could be produced on plants by interposing colored glass between them and the sun. Blue glass accelerates growth; and Messrs. Lawson, of Edinburgh, have built a stove-house glazed with blue glass, in which they test the value of seeds for sale or export. The practice is to sow a hundred seeds, and to judge of the quality by the number that germinate; the more, of course, the better. Formerely, ten days or a fortnight elapsed while waiting for the germination of the seeds; but in the blue stove-house two or three days suffice a saving of time worth, so say the firm, ' £500 a year.'"

So was it in Sicily, and in all the Grecian islands in Mexico before the days of Cortes-and in Peru under the Incas; and so has it since been seen to be in Belgium, and in Holland. Everywhere, as centralization has grown, and as men have been forced to look to a distant market, it has declined, as we see it to have done in Greece and Italy, in Mexico, and in Peru; and everywhere, as agriculture has declined, and land has lost its value, men have become more and more enslaved.*

§ 12. The views above presented harmonize perfectly with those of Adam Smith, while differing totally from those of the English school, which gave to the world the theory of over-populationnow constituting the real groundwork of the modern political economy. No two systems ever differed more widely the one looking entirely to the promotion of commerce, while the other looks as exclusively to trade; and yet, the teachers of the latter claim to belong to the school of the illustrious Briton, to whom the world is indebted for the Wealth of Nations!

The one regards man as the being he is fitted to obtain the mastery over nature, and acquiring it by means of combination with his fellow-men; while the other sees in him a mere instrument to be used by trade. Such being the case, it is no matter for surprise that in showing how it is, that in the progress of nations, population tends to become divided, the latter should have looked to bodies only-leaving altogether out of view the effect of commerce in stimulating into activity those infinitely various faculties with which man has been endowed, and for the exertion

"Columella says that, over the larger part of Italy, the instances are few in which the return is more than four to one. The increasing lamentations over diminished produce, as we descend in the series of authors, are quite consonant with these returns. They are confirmed also by unequivocal declarations in the later writers-that both the selling price and rent of land had declined, though the price of wheat had risen gradually from 3s. 6d. per quarter before, and 10s. in, the time of Cato, to 60s. in the time of Pliny. The expense of agricultural labor had not, in the mean time, increased materially. Palladius, the latest author, states the price of an agricultural slave to be from £60 to £66."- GISBORNE: Essays on Agriculture, p. 184.

Rome and her people were great absentee owners-living upon the contributions of distant provinces. The land of Italy was then held in enormous masses, and was cultivated by slaves. Production being, therefore, small, land and labor were both low in price, while food was dear, and pauperism almost universal. Centralization and over-population thus travel always hand in hand together.

of which alone those bodies were intended. The body of flesh is to be regarded as the mere instrument to be used by the mind. the soul-placed within it, and constituting MAN; and yet, of this real man political economy takes no account whatever-contenting itself with regarding him in the light of mere slave to animal passions, which prompt him to the pursuit of a course of conduct leading inevitably to his enslavement by his fellow-men. Grant him exemption from the evils of war, followed by increase in the facility of obtaining supplies of food, and at once, according to it, he rushes into matrimony-procreating his species with such rapidity that at the close of a brief period the poverty and wretchedness from which he had but just emerged, are reproduced. A slave he was thus created, and as a slave it is that he is treated.

To prove that he might be justly so regarded, it was needed to supply a law of nature in virtue of which his wants increased as his powers decreased. This was done by Messrs. Malthus and Ricardo, when they proved, as they supposed, that, by reason of "the constantly decreasing fertility of the soil," the earth was a machine of constantly decreasing powers, whose cultivation required the application of a constantly increasing quantity of labor, to be rewarded by as constantly decreasing a return. Such being the case, agriculture came to be looked upon as the least profitable of all pursuits; whence it naturally followed, that diminution in the proportion of the labors of a community devoted to increasing the quantity of food and raw materials, and increase in that given to manufactures, trade, and transportation, were to be hailed as blessings, and as evidences of advancing civilization. England is, as we are told, superior to France, because, in the latter, two-thirds of the population are agricultural; whereas, in the former, only a fourth is so employed, while the people are better fed; and hence it is concluded that large farms, managed by tenants, and worked by hired laborers, are more productive than smaller ones, owned by the men who cultivate them, and who find therein little savings funds for all the mental and physical effort that the mere hireling wastes in seeking employment in the pot-house in which he expends his hours of leisure—and in his travels to and from the place at which he labors. Common sense teaches the reverse of all this, and so does Adam Smith. The latter knew, as all must know, that the little pro

prietor-giving his whole time and mind to the piece of land upon which he was always resident-was a greater improver than the absentee owner of immense estates, or his middleman agent -the latter always looking to present profit, and having interests directly opposed to those of the man who owned the land, and of those by whom the work of cultivation was performed. Such, however, is not the doctrine of the English school that has succeeded to Dr. Smith, and whose teachings may be briefly summed up in the few brief words—“The more middlemen—the more the people who stand between the producer and the consumer, to be maintained at their joint expense-the better it will be for all."

That such is the tendency of their doctrines, and that diminution in the proportion borne by the agricultural to the transporting, converting, and trading population is to be regarded as an improvement, is evident from the fact that one of the most distinguished teachers of the British school assures his readers, that "there are no limits to the bounty of nature in manufactures; but there are limits, and those not very remote, to her bounty in agriculture. The greatest possible amount of capital might," as he continues, "be expended in the construction of steam-engines, or of any other sort of machinery; and after they had been multiplied indefinitely, the last would be as powerful and efficient in producing commodities and saving labor as the first. Such, however, is not the case with the soil. Lands of the first quality," as he further says, "are speedily exhausted; and it is impossible to apply capital indefinitely even to the best soils, without obtaining from it a constantly diminishing rate of profit."*

Were this so, the most rapidly advancing country would always be that in which the attractions of trade and manufactures were greatest, and those of agriculture least; and the perfection of wealth and power would be found in the abandonment of cultivation, and the centralization of whole populations in the narrow streets and unwholesome houses and cellars of cities like London and Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham-being directly the reverse of what was held by Dr. Smith. Happily, the truth is to be found in a direction as entirely opposed to this, as are the real facts in relation to the occupation and settlement of the earth to those imaginary ones assumed by Mr. Ricardo, and insisted upon * MCCULLOCH: Principles of Political Economy, p. 166.