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§ 74. Man's " power over nature" continues to grow with every advance in the compactness of society. Men obtain the use of more iron and coal, houses and ships, wool and cotton, in return for less labor, as society advances. When the density of population made it worth while to carry the water in pipes through the streets of our city, it was obtained with far less outlay of labor thau when every man carried his bucket to the river's bank, or even to the pump, whose erection also marked a stage in social development. So when through the growth of population it becomes "worth while" to sink a shaft to the coalbed, it is no longer necessary to waste wood as fuel and spend labor in chopping it, and the time saved can be spent in turning the trees into lumber or some other profitable work. Till the grist-mill is erected the labor of a thousand arms is expended in grinding grain; the work then becomes the business of a few persons, and the rest have the more time for better work than turning hand-mills or pounding the wheat in querns. And these are but specimen facts that represent the whole movement of society.

"From the beginning," says Herbert Spencer, " the pressure of population has been the proximate cause of progress. It produced the original diffusion of the race. It compelled men to abandon predatory habits and take to agriculture. It led to the clearing of the earth's surface. It forced men into the social state; made social organization inevitable; and has developed the social sentiments. It has stimulated to progressive improvements in production, and to increased skill and intelligence. It is daily thrusting us into closer contact and more mutually dependent relationships. After having caused, as it ultimately must, the due peopling of the globe, and the raising of all its habitable parts into the highest state of culture; after having brought all processes for the satisfaction of human wants to perfection; after having at the same time developed the intellect into complete competency for its work and the feelings. into complete fitness for social life,-the pressure of population must gradually bring itself to an end."

CHAPTER FIFTH.

THE NATIONAL ECONOMY OF LAND.

75. WE have defined a nation as a people occupying a continuous area, and owning this in a more eminent sense than any part of it is owned by any of its citizens. Its stewardship of the economic interests of its people extends to the general oversight of their rural economy, and calls for the careful removal of all obstacles-especially those of a legal kind-to its improvement and that of the people engaged in it; and also for the adoption of such measures of improvement as are not easily attainable by individual action. It may justly be said that this is true of the duty of the state towards any form of industry; but from the peculiar relation of agriculture to the very existence of the nation, the state stands in a relation of far greater responsibility here. Many of those who most incline to exclude the state from all activity in the sphere of industrial interests, are quite ready to admit that where motives of public policy call for interference, the landowner may fairly be treated as the trustee or steward of the national property, not in any absolute sense the owner.

§ 76. What was said in the preceding chapter of the general advance of industrial methods through the growth of numbers and of the resulting power of coöperation, is eminently true of agriculture. As time advances, larger crops are reaped at a less cost upon lands that were early occupied, and those that were previously inaccessible to tillage, are cleared or drained. A larger amount of labor and capital becomes available, and can be expended with perfect safety upon the same field, as the crops are increased in still greater ratio. Especially the division of labor contributes to this. The early agriculturist was "Jack of all trades and master of none." His house, his clothing, his rude tools, everything that he had, was his own workmanship. But when these are produced for him by skilled artisans, who set

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him at leisure to do his farm-work better, he obtains all these things at a less outlay of labor, and of much improved quality.

§ 77. Early agriculture was extensive in its method; that is, it expended a small capital upon a large surface. Just as the hunter required a larger area than the shepherd, and the shepherd more than the farmer, so the bad and imperfect agriculture of a poor half-savage age, required a larger area than when methods of tillage are highly improved and the capital at the command of the farmer has increased. Thus we find half-barbarous peoples in earlier times driven by famine from lands that now sustain a dense population.

English agriculture in the middle ages is a case in point. As much of the land as is now under wheat was taken up in raising as much food as would now suffice for a million and a half of persons. The population was something between that number and two and a half millions; yet nearly the whole people were employed in producing food; even the townsmen poured out into the country to help to gather in the harvest, and the Long Vacation at the Universities was established that their thirty thousand students might go home to assist. As much seed was Sown to the acre as at present, but the average yield was only above one-fourth what it is now. Yet the climate of England, as of all Northern Europe, was warmer than it now is. Grapes grew plentifully in the open air, and wine was made that compared with those of France. "The land was imperfectly drained; the working of the soil was shallow; the manures employed were limited" to such as were ready at hand, at a time when the Flemish farmers imported English marl. "Scanty as the crop was, it seems to have been very exhausting, for half the land, in ordinary cases, lay fallow. . . Such crops as were obtained, were not procured without large relative expenditure." The agricultural implements were of the poorest; the plough was a ponderous structure of wood and iron, which it took four horses to drag over, rather than through, the soil. Metal was so scarce, being mostly imported from Normandy, that the wear and tear of plough-iron in a dry season was a large item in the farm budget.

As little hay and no green crops were raised, the sheep were mostly killed at Martinmas; and such as were left, with the oxen, starved through the winter, so that improvement of stock was impossible. As late as 1547, bullocks bought for the navy weighed less than 400 pounds. Few garden-vegetables were cultivated, and down to the reign of Elizabeth, they were imported for the tables of the rich from the Continent. This want and the general use of salt food spread scurvy and even leprosy among the people.

See Prof. Thorold Rogers's History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vol. i.

§ 78. Later agriculture is intensive; that is, it expends a large capital upon a small surface. It finds at its hand sources of wealth that tax all its resources for their mastery, but more than repay the larger outlay. It goes down to the sub-soil, instead of spreading over the top-soil of new fields; it finds a new farm under the old one. It gives up methods of rotation in which the land lay fallow, and adopts a new one, in which, through generous returns to the soil, it yields two crops a year. It multiplies the number of live-stock on a farm, and feeds them generously and under shelter, that it may obtain the means to overcome the natural barrenness of the soil or multiply its fertility. It masters the coldness and heaviness of clayey or lowlying soils by artificial drainage, so that the crop in harvest is advanced by weeks and the peril of the autumnal rains avoided. It offers the highest premium for improvements in live-stock, seeds and implements. "Many of these agricultural practices are only possible where there is a large agricultural population; for which, on the other hand, work is found by these very practices" (Laveleye).

§ 79. While the finest results in agriculture are achieved (as in parts of Saxony) by the outlay of a large capital, directed by large intelligence, upon a considerable area of land,—yet, with the actual human material engaged in farming, and in the existing state of its intelligence, the best results, on the whole, are had where the farms are small and especially where they are owned by the actual cultivators. Progress towards the sub

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division of the land-up to a certain limit-is a gain to agriculture. The opposite is a retrogression.

This fact was known even to the ancients. Solomon seems to refer to it when he says: Much food is in the tillage of the poor;" and the Mosaic law forbade the permanent alienation of lands after their distribution among the people. But the law was evaded or ignored in the eagerness to form great estates; and Isaiah denounces a woe upon "them that join house to house and field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the land," and the woe is the desolation of the land and the reduction of its average yield of food for man (V. 8-10).

Under Roman rule in Italy the small holdings were swallowed up in the great estates of the aristocracy, in spite of the efforts. of the Gracchi to preserve the patrimony of the poor. The first step seems to have been the enclosure (possessio) of the common lands (ager publicus) upon which the common people depended for grazing, and which were absolutely necessary to their methods of agriculture. (The same process was arrested in Attica by the laws of Solon, but was carried out in Lacedæmon.) Pliny tells us the result: "Large estates have been the ruin of Italy (Latifundia perdidere Italiam)." The peninsula declined steadily in all the elements of wealth and production. The emperors had to obtain from Africa and Egypt the wheat that fed the Roman populace. The incursions of the barbarians led to the breaking up and redistribution of these monstrous estates, and Italy was able to feed her own children again.

§ 80. In the kingdoms of Western Europe only England and Spain have repeated the experience of ancient Italy, and only the former persists in the policy that led to it.

In these kingdoms (as in most, perhaps in all, countries in the earliest stage of society), the land was at first held, not by individual owners "in severall," but by bodies of freemen associated in a village community. Their land or mark lay, as it were, in two concentric circles around the village or thorp. The outer and broader was the folk-land or common on which their cattle