of his land, which must otherwise be devoted to the growth of crops for restoring the fertility which the tubercles exhaust.

It follows, from considerations which in the preceding paragraphs it has been sought to elucidate, in scant proportion to their importance, that the vicinity of the producer to the place where conversion and exchange are effected-in other words, to the consumers-is an indispensable condition of his being able to grow those crops which the earth yields most abundantly. The same space which, sown with wheat, gives what has been termed muscular matter - that is, muscle-sustaining power-to the amount of two hundred pounds, if planted with cabbages gives fifteen hundred pounds; in turnips, a thousand pounds; in beans, four hundred.* It is, however, as we

have seen, but a limited circle around the centres of population, in which the agriculturist has the capacity to determine freely to what object he will consecrate his land and his labour. In proportion to his distance from the consumer, two causes act in concert to contract his power. The first is the cost of transporting the crop to market, which compels him to select those whose bulk is small compared to their value, because they require much land and much labour for their production. The second is the difficulty of bringing back, over the increasing distance, the refuse of the crop; in default of which the crop itself runs out. Whatever may be the quality of soil cultivated, these conclusions are equally valid. They hold good, without reference to the truth or falsehood of the theory of Ricardo, in regard to the occupation of the earth; while they are fatal to that of Malthus, as showing that density of population is essential to the plenitude of subsistence.

The illustrations which we have employed have generally supposed the existence of towns, from which the fertilizing elements remaining in the refuse of vegetable and animal products, after all has been extracted from them which is useful for the food and clothing of human beings, as well as what the body rejects after the process of digestion, can be gathered up to stimulate further production. There is a visible tendency in those who devote themselves to the work of conversion and exchange, to agglomerate in towns.

* Professor Johnston, in Edinburgh Review, October, 1849.

The

stage of industrial progress at which any community has arrived, is denoted by the proportion subsisting between its rural and civic population. It is an unavoidable tendency; for population attracts population. Wherever a blacksmith sets up his forge and anvil, he creates a demand for the presence of the baker, the tailor, the carpenter, and every other artizan whose labour can contribute to his comfort. Their children require the presence of the schoolmaster; and with him comes the demand for the bookseller and the printer. A single tailor may perhaps make the clothing for a hundred men; if So, the advent of one individual calls for only that minute fraction, the hundredth part of a tailor. He requires, however, some fraction of the labour of a hundred other craftsmen; and when the fractions are combined, as by the accession of three hundred persons to the population of a town, their value amounts to one or more units. Let a factory be erected upon the bank of any stream, and a hundred weavers or spinners be collected, it is evident at once that butchers, bakers, shoemakers, &c., must also come, and that the latter invite still further accessions, by furnishing a market for the labour of others. If there are only enough carpenters to supply the wants of the operatives in the factory, in making machinery, buildings, &c., another is necessary, to saw and plane for the blacksmith and his fellow-mechanics, for the grocer, the doctor, and the clergyman. With every one that comes, the necessity of sending to a distant town for some product or service, diminishes, the advantages of combination increase, and the town becomes more attractive. People gravitate towards it in proportion to its mass-to the number who have already been collected.

The argument, however, derives none of its force from the supposition that the consumers are assembled in large numbers in villages or cities, and loses none if that supposition is negatived. On the contrary, the more equally the inhabitants are diffused throughout their territory, the less is the aggregate of transportation which substracts from their productive power. The natural course of things is towards the growth of a multitude of little centres of exchange, for the reasons thus indicated by Adam Smith. After remarking that, "According to the natural course of things, the greater part of the capital of every growing society is first directed to agricul

ture, afterwards to manufactures, and, last of all, to foreign trade," he declares "that order of things is in every country promoted by the natural inclinations of man ;" and, giving the reasons why man retains, in every stage of his existence, a predilection for the primitive employment of the race, he continues:

"Without the assistance of some artificers, indeed, the cultivation of land cannot be carried on, but with great inconveniency and continual interruption. Smiths, carpenters, wheelwrights and ploughwrights, masons and bricklayers, tanners, shoemakers, and tailors, are people whose service the farmer has frequent occasion for. Such artificers, too, stand occasionally in need of the assistance of one another; and as their residence is not, like that of the farmer, necessarily tied down to a precise spot, they naturally settle in the neighbourhood of one another, and thus form a small town or village. The butcher, the brewer, and the baker soon join them, together with many other artificers and retailers, necessary or useful for supplying their occasional wants, and who contribute still further to augment the town. The inhabitants of the town and those of the country are mutually the servants of one another. The town is a continual fair or market, to which the inhabitants of the country resort, in order to exchange their rude for manufactured produce. It is this commerce which supplies the inhabitants of the town, both with the materials of their work and the means of their subsistence. The quantity of the finished work which they sell to the inhabitants of the country, necessarily regulates the quantity of the materials and provisions which they buy. Neither their employment nor subsistence, therefore, can augment, but in proportion to the augmentation of the demand from the country for finished work; and this demand can augment only in proportion to the extension of improvement and cultivation. Had human institutions, therefore, never disturbed the natural course of things, the progressive wealth and increase of the towns would, in every political society, be consequential, and in proportion to the improvement and cultivation of the territory or country."

The great cities, which grow up to proportions outrunning the cultivation of the country, where population is unnaturally congested, and which Jefferson called "eye-sores on the body politic," these are everywhere seen to be the result of foreign commerce. So far as they constitute an exception or impediment to the natural tendency of things, towards the distribution of exchanges among numerous local centres, it is the consequence, not of physical laws, but of subjection to institutions, which tolerate the effort to thwart men's natural inclination to conform to those laws, and make their exchanges at home rather than abroad.

It has now, we conceive, been rigidly demonstrated, that inland or domestic trade maintains at least double the number of producers that could be sustained within the country by the opposite system, and that it necessarily tends to increase the efficiency of all those

labourers, while foreign commerce tends to rob the earth of the aliment, by which alone its fertility can be maintained. The proposition is especially true of that kind of commerce which the teaching of the modern English Economists, and the steady policy of the British Government, has sought to impose upon the nations-a commerce to consist in the production, by all the countries that can be coaxed or coerced into the arrangement, of raw materials for food and clothing, to be transported to the workshops of the Islanders, for conversion, and carried, in the shape of the finished wares, back to the producers for consumption. Against the enactments by which that Government deprived us, while yet in colonial subjection to her rule, of freedom of trade and of freedom of production, the indispensable basis of trade, Adam Smith remonstrated with indignant. energy. Among the regulations which he denounces, the following are enumerated:

"While Great Britain encourages in America the manufacture of pig and bar iron, by exempting them from duties to which the like commodities are subject when imported from any other country, she imposes an absolute prohibition upon the erection of steel furnaces and slit-mills in any of her American plantations. She will not suffer her colonies to work in those more refined manufactures, even for their own consumption; but insists upon their purchasing, of her merchants and manufacturers, all goods of this kind which they have occasion for.

"She prohibits the exportation from one province to another by water, and even the carriage by land upon horseback, or in a cart, of hats, of wools, and woollen goods, of the produce of America; a regulation which effectually prevents the establishment of any manufacture of such commodities for distant sale, and confines the industry of her colonists in this way to such coarse and household manufactures as a private family commonly makes for its own use, or for that of some of its neighbours in the same province."

The same course pursued in regard to these States, has characterized British policy in the treatment of her colonies the world over; the uniform object being, to compel them to export their raw products, in the rudest shape, and to effect their exchanges at her mills, and forges, and shops, instead of effecting them at home, by means of the construction of the requisite machinery of conversion. It required a seven years' war for us to obtain the freedom of trade, so far as it depends upon freedom from direct legislative prohibition. When that was accomplished, the new States were sorely deficient in industrial education, which England had prohibited them from

acquiring, and which she still exercised the power of impeding them in acquiring, by prohibiting the emigration of artizans and the exportation of machinery. With the advantages she possessed and maintained, by the monopoly of machinery and of the workmen 'skilled in its construction and use, her manufacturers were able to undersell and ruin the adventurous artizans, who in other countries made the attempt to imitate her machinery, and educate themselves in the modes of employing it.

It is obvious that a monopoly of the trade of conversion, has the same effect upon nations who submit to it, whether maintained by superiority in art, or by superiority in arms. In either case, it compels them to make their exchanges in a manner that wastes and exhausts the sources of production, and robs labour of its legitimate reward. They have to determine the question whether they will permit themselves to be forced into a course of operations, contrary to the order of Nature and to the natural inclinations of man, or will vindicate their freedom to conform to that order and to pursue those inclinations. The question is to be resolved by a comparison of advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages of acquiescence which we have enumerated are permanent in their nature. The advantages of internal production and domestic exchange are likewise permanent, and, what is more, increasing. Increased diversification of employment, and consequent skill-increased capital, from increased productiveness in the earth and diminished waste in transportation, necessarily facilitate still further increase in skill, and in capital for the future. The people that once begins the improvement of its productive power, finds every step in its progress more easy than the last; while every moment that it permits itself to be driven on the downward path, diminishes its ability to make a stand or retrace the way. On the other hand, there is an immediate and palpable disadvantage in resistance. It involves an apparent sacrifice, that of paying a larger price, counted in coin, for domestic wares, than that at which they are offered by the foreign nation. Such, at least, is the temporary effect. If it be made to appear that this effect is to be permanent, and that the money-price is a true indication of the cost in labour at which the foreign wares can be procured, the propriety of substituting domestic production for purchase