be the effect upon the general average condition of the human family. There are other consequences equally marked, affecting the relative position and power of the different classes into which men are distributed for the purposes of Economical inquiry, which will be considered at the appropriate stage, and the absence of which, in point of fact, is a conclusive argument against the theory.

It was a very plausible notion that men, with "the earth before them where to choose," would have selected in the first instance the lands which were capable of yielding the largest returns to their labour. Its plausibility is proved by its having been so generally accepted, and so long gone without contradiction. But it manifestly rested upon the assumption that men, at the origin of cultivation, possessed equal power to clear and till the fertile and the thin soils, and had only to select between things equally feasible—the one offering greater advantages, and the other less.

We have already presented, in a very summary manner, an outline of those considerations by which Mr. Carey proved, that a truly sagacious conjecture would have anticipated precisely the contrary course to that imagined by Ricardo. The latter entirely overlooked that want of implements, and wretchedness in the quality of those actually possessed, which at the dawn of civilization have everywhere controlled man's choice, by limiting his power. This universal fact, about which there is no dispute, would of itself compel an hypothesis the very reverse of Mr. Ricardo's.

But the question is most satisfactorily solved by an appeal to history. It is one of fact. What has been the course of men in the occupation and cultivation of long-settled countries? What is their course, as exhibited by contemporaneous communities in different stages of advancement? Our reasoning from antecedent probabilities might be erroneous; for the omission of a single element would vitiate the whole calculation, and that element we may have failed to detect and allow for; but we are absolutely certain no such mistake can have occurred in the practical working of things. Every cause which can have influenced the result has certainly operated, whether its existence has been observed or not. Mr. Carey has brought the question to this test. He traces the history of settlement in the various sections of our Union, in Mexico, the

West Indies, and South America, and shows that everywhere the earliest colonists have occupied the light, dry soils of the uplands, leaving the heavy woodlands of the valleys, and the swamps bordering upon the streams, to be felled and drained by their successors. Wherever we go, we find that in proportion as the population is dense, and the mass of wealth great, the more are the best soils cultivated; while, wherever land is abundant and population sparse, it is seen to recede from the river banks, and to be perched along the crest of the ridges. In the regions sufficiently advanced to admit the construction of canals and railroads, every one has it in his power to verify the fact, by observing the contrast in the aspect of the lands bordering their course, and those which line the old highways. The latter will generally be found ascending every hilltop which lies in the neighbourhood of their general direction, even when nothing is saved in point of distance by going over the hill instead of going around it. It is usually found, indeed, that the length of a railroad, connecting two towns at any considerable distance from each other, is less than that of the old roads which formed the route of travel before it was built; although the former is necessarily under restrictions which prevent attempts to save distance at the expense of elevations in the grade, much more than the ordinary carriage-road. But the highway is lined with cultivated fields and with houses. It was made to facilitate communication between them, its track worn by the footsteps of men before it was run out by the surveyor, and its purposes compelled it to go where population went, with small regard to the labour which its steep grades would impose upon the beasts of draught that were to toil over it. The railroad, on the contrary, is constructed by engineers, whose problem it is to reduce the power to be expended in drawing heavy loads to a minimum, regard being had both to distance and to elevation. It plunges through swamps and forests, as if to hide itself from the habitations of men. They will grow up upon its edge in due season, for the road has drained the swamps, and let in the sunlight to the gloomy depths of the woods; but upon the first opening of a railroad, we ordinarily are struck with the juxtaposition of this work of highest art with those of rudest Nature.*

"The Turtle Creek Hill lies upon the route of the central read from

Even in the prairies of the West, where hills are unknown, and which, so far from being encumbered with trees, are contra-distinguished from timber-land- the familiar division in the States in which they lie, being into timber-land and prairie-the same law of Nature which assigns the poorer soils to the first cultivators, is found to prevail. At the North American Pomological Convention, held at Syracuse, N. Y., in September, 1849, the Committee for the State of Illinois in their Report,* say,

“Many small tracts, known as 'wet prairie' fifteen years ago, and rejected by the first settlers, have become dry by being annually resown, and fed down by domestic animals, without any other than its natural drainage, and exposure to the sun and air, by the destruction of the impervious screen of tall 'slough grass.'

"The dry prairies' are generally very similar in appearance, so far as surface is concerned. Small portions of 'level prairie' are found everywhere, but to constitute dry prairie it must be 'rolling.' Between the

Philadelphia to Pittsburg, about fifteen miles east of the latter. Time out of mind, it has been the main impediment of that great thoroughfare; any ridge of the Alleghany chain being more easy of ascent. The road, rising from the creek, clambers the steep hill-side by doublings and windings, which evasively relieve the acclivity, but leave it still the catastrophe of the trip. But there was no help for it, for it was the proper and direct route through and by the settlements of the vicinity. Last year the Central Pennsylvania Railroad was made through that region; but, turning aside from the farm-houses and taverns on the road, as not at all in the way of its duty, and avoiding the bluff ridge as very much in the way of its progress, it made its way through the swamp, down the bank of the creek, following its course to the Monongahela River, and so, by a level track reached its terminus at Pittsburg, lessening the distance one mile, as well as avoiding the ascent altogether. The explanation is apparent: the public had to clamber that horrible hill for fifty years, because the earlier cultivators of the country chose the hill-sides and heads of streams, and their thinner and lighter lands, of necessity, leaving the deep, rich soil on the margin of the creek, and the narrow valley through which it ran, in its primeval state, uncultivated and untenanted, and, therefore, out of the line of travel. Here the expense of drainage has delayed the reduction of this waste land until now; though it lay directly in the nearest and best route of travel, and within marketing distance of a city demanding its products." --Dr. William Elder, in Sartain's Magazine for June, 1852.

* The proceedings of that Convention are published in a pamphlet; but the Report from which the above extract is made, may be found in the Patent-Office Report (Agricultural) for 1849-50, at page 430.

waves on this great ocean of God's own beautiful sod are the 'sloughs,' the terror of the carly emigrant, and the most valued possession of his successor, as often affording water, and always an unfailing and most luxuriant natural meadow. These sloughs are the drains of the dry prairie. They are in general nearly parallel, and oftenest at about a right angle with the course of the rivers; they are from 140 to 160 rods asunder, and sometimes of many miles in length. The soil of the dry prairie is from 12 to 18 inches deep in this region; the wet prairie in general much deeper; and the alluvion (of the river bottoms), as in all countries, of irregular and often astonishing depth."

Mr. Carey extends his historical examination to Great Britain and the States of the Continent. In England, with the course of whose cultivation we are best acquainted, the existence and operation of the law which he discovered is most strongly demonstrated. The forests and swamps of the days of Richard the Lion-Hearted, are now cultivated lands of the highest fertility. The morasses, which had nearly swallowed up the army of William the Conqueror, on his return from devastating the north, are now the cornfields and meadows of South Lancashire, among the richest in the kingdom. The lands most recently taken into cultivation are the fens of Lincoln; and the counties upon the border, which two centuries ago were inhabited by moss-troopers, are now proverbial for their productiveness. In Cæsar's account of the island, as he found it, he represents the inhabitants of the southern coast as the only ones who had made any advance in the art of tillage, and that the natives were rude in their manner of life, in proportion as they receded from that coast. Those more distant, he says, never sowed their land, but followed the primitive callings of the hunter and the herdsman, clad in the skins and living upon the flesh and milk of their flocks and herds, and the spoils of the chase. The lands of the southern counties are those adapted to tillage by men possessing little capital and power, and yielding comparatively inferior returns; those recently subdued are such as require a heavy outlay of capital to prepare them for cultivation, and were therefore impracticable, until a large mass of wealth had been accumulated, and powerful machinery brought into use. The best of them were valueless until the invention of the steam-engine.*

* The Bedford level, which derives its name from the fact that the Earl of Bedford commenced its drainage by digging canals, in 1630, is a low tract of fenny country, which begins at Ely, in Cambridgeshire, and runs

It is unnecessary to follow Mr. Carey in his sketch of the history of settlement in Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, &c. It would do injustice to the very interesting outline which he has presented to attempt to condense it, and we prefer to urge the inquiring student to read it in the pages of the "Past, Present, and Future." A circumstance of more recent occurrence than the publication of that work, authorizes us to take the fact as undisputed. Mr. Carey's opinion having been adopted by Bastiat, the most brilliant and acute of the French Economists, a discussion sprung up upon the opposing northwest into the valley of the Witham, in Lincolnshire. This tract is seventy or eighty miles in length, and from twenty to forty in width, containing nearly seven hundred thousand acres. Cromwell took an interest in its drainage. He sent great numbers of the Scotch prisoners taken at the battle of Dunbar, to be employed upon the work-unhealthy business —and afterwards he sent 500 Dutch prisoners, taken in the sea-fight between Blake and Van Tromp, in 1652; they remained ten years, when the peace enabled them to return home. They were recommended by their experience in such works in Holland, which has been wholly redeemed from the sea. In Porter's Progress of the Nation, vol. 1, page 166, it is said: "The fens in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and other eastern counties, in which the lowlands known as the Bedford level occur, were formerly very imperfectly relieved from their surplus water by means of windmills; and, to a considerable extent, they are so still. Where this is the case, the farmer has sometimes to witness the prostration of all his hopes for the year, almost at the very period of their expected accomplishment. It frequently happens, that when rain falls in large quantities near the time of harvest, there is not a breath of wind to move the sails of his mill, and the field in which the yellow grain was waving is speedily converted into a lake. Some of the land thus circumstanced is among the most fertile in the kingdom, consisting of a bed of decomposed vegetable matter, thirty feet in depth, and yielding crops of from four to five quarters per acre. By the substitution of steam-power for the uncertain agency of wind, the crop is now secured from the disaster we have mentioned." He proceeds to state that engines of 60 and 70 horse-power had been erected within three or four years previous to his writing (in 1836), each of which is employed in draining from 6000 to 7000 acres of land. The cost of the first establishment of the engines is stated at £1 per acre, and the expense of keeping them at work at 2s. 6d. per acre. Since Mr. Porter wrote, scientific engineering has executed works dispensing, for large districts, with both steamengines and windmills.-See Edinburgh Review for October, 1847, article on Holland.