To this unceasing waste of labor it is due that agriculture has made, as yet, so little progress.* The real powers of the soil remain undeveloped, and therefore it is, that the French people are so much distinguished by dread of over-population, and by anxiety for outlets for the products of their manufacturing establishments.

Centralization impedes commerce at home, and for want of that commerce the rich lands of France remain as yet undrained and uncultivated. 'There is," says a recent traveller, "at this hour a pressing need of all the surplus labor of France, for the next forty years, to be absorbed in the proper drainage of her soil alone. For want of this, whole districts are submerged, or turned to marsh, for three or four months between November and April, obstructing labor, loading the air with unwholesome humidity, and subjecting the peasantry to fevers and other diseases. Thorough draining alone would immensely increase the annual product, the wealth, and ultimately, by promoting health and diffusing plenty, even the population of France..

"So, too, with regard to ploughing. It is not quite so bad here highways; and they are so managed that neither one nor the other can sell, even to a ready-money purchaser. Those parts of some young forests which require it are not even thinned. The impossibility of purchasing wood, from Sanlac to Verdon, (a country destitute of it,) makes theft and depredation almost a lamentable necessity."-BOWRING: Second Report, p. 133.

The octroi payable on the introduction of wine into Paris is nearly equal to the cost of the wine itself.

With us (in France) the average production is thirteen and a half bushels of wheat and eleven of rye per acre, deducting seed. Adding to this maize and buckwheat, and dividing the whole by the number of hectares sown, the average result for each acre is rather more than seven bushels of wheat, about three bushels of rye, and a little more than one bushel of maize or buckwheat making a total of about twelve bushels per acre. In England the production is twenty-eight bushels of wheat-say more than double in quantity, and in money value three times as much. This superiority is certainly not to be attributed as in the case of the natural and artificial meadows and roots, and, to a certain extent, also with oats and barley-to the soil and climate, but to superior cultivation, which shows itself chiefly in limiting the wheat-crop to the extent of land rendered fit for its production. "Scotland and Ireland are included in the above estimate; but taking England by itself, the results are much more striking. That small country, which is no larger than a fourth of France, alone produces thirteen million quarters of wheat, six of barley, and twelve of oats. If France produced in the same ratio, her yield, deducting seed, would be fifty million quarters of wheat, and seventy of barley, oats, and other grain-equal to at least double her present production; and we ought to obtain more, considering the nature of our soil and climate, both much more favorable to cereals than the soil and climate of England."- LAVERGNE: Economie Rurale de l'Angleterre.

as in Spain, where a friend this season saw peasants ploughing with an implement composed of two clumsy sticks of wood, one of which (the horizontal) worked its way through the earth after the manner of a hog's snout, while the other, inserted in the former at a convenient angle, served as a handle, being guided by the ploughman's left hand, while he managed the team with his right. With this relic of the good old days, the peasant may have aunoyed and irritated a rood of ground per day, to the depth of three inches; and, as care is taken not to afflict in this fashion any field that cannot be irrigated, he may possibly, by the conjunction of good luck with laborious culture, obtain half a crop."

"France," as he continues, "has naturally a magnificent soil. I prefer it, all things considered, to that of our own Western States. We have much land that is richer at the outset, but very little that will hold its own, in defiance of maltreatment, so well as this. Lime abounds here in every form the railroads are often cut through hills of loose chalk and very much of the subsoil in this vicinity appears to be a rotten limestone or gypsum, but is said to be a marine deposit - proved such by the infinity of shells therein imbedded. There is not a particle of stone in the surface soil: the rotten gypsum is, for the most part, easily traversed by the plough, though at a depth of ten to twenty feet the same original formation may be found hard enough to quarry into building stone. To reinforce such a soil after the exhaustion produced by a hundred grain-crops in succession, it is only requisite to run the plough two inches deeper than it has hitherto gone a process urgently desirable on other grounds than this. I never before observed land so thoroughly fortified against the destructive tendencies of human ignorance, indolence, and folly. Then, the summer of France, as compared with ours, is cool and humid, exposing grain-crops to fewer dangers of smut, rust, &c., and breeding far fewer insects than does ours. I have seldom seen finer wheat than grows profusely around Paris; and I think this region ought to average more bushels to the acre in the course of a century than any part of the United States. "*

§ 12. Adam Smith teaches his readers that the value of intercourse between man and man, is dependent upon the frequency * GREELEY: Europe Revisited.

of the exchanges and that a capital of a thousand pounds, when the returns are made twice or thrice in a year, can keep in constant employment a quantity of productive labor" equal to what could be kept employed by two or three thousand pounds when the returns are made only once a year. Believing in the advantages of commerce, he desired to teach his countrymen that "the inland or home trade" was "the most important of all," and the one in which an equal capital afforded the greatest revenue, and created the greatest employment to the people of the country;" and that such must necessarily be the case will be clear to those who reflect, that every exchange of service for service, or of product for product, creates a double demand for human effortthat the nearer the parties to the exchange, the smaller is the proportion absorbed by the parties engaged in the works of trade, transportation, or conversion*-that the smaller that proportion, the more rapid must be the accumulation of wealth, the greater must be the power to command the services of nature, and the more instantly must the demand for human service follow the production of the ability to render it.-All power to furnish either mental or bodily effort is as much the result of a consumption of capital by the engine composed of flesh and blood, as is the power of traction by the iron one a result of the consumption of fuel; and the waste of capital by the engineer who allows his steam to escape without having first done its work, is precisely similar to that of the society which permits its people to remain unemployed. That such was the case, was obvious to both Colbert and Turgot, and therefore it was, that all their measures were directed towards the promotion of commerce, and the removal of the obstacles standing in the way of direct intercourse between the producer and the consumer-chief among which were those resulting from the necessity for dependence on the trader, whether abroad or at home.

To the system they established, in direct accordance with the ideas of Dr. Smith, it is due that France has prospered, and that

"Le Progres, journal of la Haute Marne, inquires why it is, that bread and meat increase in price, while manufactured goods are twice or thrice less than they were a century since."-Journal des Economistes, May, 1854, p. 161.

Approximation in the prices of raw materials and manufactured goods is necessary consequence of diminution in the proportion of the trader, transporter, and converter, and furnishes, as has before been said, the most conclusive of all the evidences of advancing civilization.

her people have been enabled steadily to enlarge their consumption of foreign and domestic products, notwithstanding her almost unceasing waste of labor in war; notwithstanding the unceasing drain upon the mental powers of the country, resulting from converting annually so large a portion of her youth into mere machines; and notwithstanding a taxation of the most oppressive character. Modern political economy would teach us, however, directly the reverse of this — adding to the waste of war the further waste that, as it assures us, is consequent upon protection; and yet France prospers, notwithstanding her terrific centralization and almost unceasing wars, while Ireland perishes in a time of profound peace; and Denmark prospers, while Portugal and India are passing out of life. Of facts like these, the modern system offers no explanation; and the reason why it does not, and cannot, do it, is, that it takes no account of man except as an animal that will procreate and must be fed as a being of necessity, and not of power. With it, commerce and trade are exchangable ideas; and yet, as we have seen, the latter is but the instrument used by the former, whose growth is in the direct ratio of the diminution of its dependence on the machinery it is, in the early ages of society, so much required to use. The power of man grows with the growth of commerce, and it declines with the necessity for trade. With every step in the former direction, he is enabled to cultivate richer soils, and more and more to develop the treasures of the earth; but, with every movement in the opposite one, he finds himself more and more forced to abandon the rich soils heretofore cultivated, and betake himself to poorer ones

leaving for future generations the vast treasures of coal and ore, marl or lime, that nature had placed beneath his feet. The policy of Colbert looked towards commerce, and therefore is it that it has stood unharmed amid the crash of revolutions.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.

§ 1. Two systems are before the world one, whose objects are to be promoted by increasing the competition for the sale of all the raw materials of manufacture, labor included; and another, which looks to increasing the competition for their purchase.

The first tends towards maintaining, and even augmenting, the necessity for machinery for transportation-and thus to increasing the influence of trade. The second would promote the growth of the associative power, and thus diminish the necessity for such machinery while enlarging the field of commerce.

The first looks to widening the space by which the producer and the consumer are separated; while the second looks to its contraction.

The one would increase the difference between the prices of raw materials and finished commodities; while the other would secure their more close approximation.

The one looks to adding to the value of commodities, and thus diminishing that of man; the other, to diminishing the value of things, and increasing that of the men who need to use them.

The one looks to increasing the proportion of mental and physical power given to trade and transportation, and thus diminishing that which might be applied to production; the other, to an increase in the proportion given to production, and a diminution in that applied to effecting changes in the places of the things produced.

The one was reprobated by Adam Smith; whereas the other is in full accordance with his doctrines, as well as with those of Colbert, the most distinguished of all the sons of France.

Leader in the advocacy of the first has been, and is, Great Britain. Leader in the establishment of the second, and most consistent in its maintenance, is France; and thus after so many