the exact equivalent of the food which he consumes, in a state fit for immediate absorption by the roots of plants.

The underlying rocks, from which the subsoil is formed, are themselves but combinations of oxygen, with a few metallic bases. The rocks which make the crust of the earth are in the aggregate about half oxygen. It is sufficiently plain that, if by any means the constituents of the rocks are brought to the surface, and dissipate in air, or enter into the structure of plants and animals, they must return again to the earth and the atmosphere. In the Economy of Nature it is provided that the leaves of trees, which annually fall to the earth, contain from seven to fifteen times more of the earthy minerals than the trunks do. When man has exhausted the surface mould, as has been done in some of our Southern States, by sending its products to foreign lands, and abandons the fields he has impoverished, their fertility is slowly restored by means of that provision. The seeds of the pine are carried by the birds, and scattered by the winds. They sprout in the deserted soil, and, sending down a long tap-root, bring up mineral sustenance from a distance much below the reach of the plants that had sucked the upper surface dry of its nutriment. This is accumulated in the leaves, which falling and rotting upon the earth, gradually form a soil capable of bearing fruit to feed man.

If vegetation be suffered, as in the state of Nature, merely to grow and rot upon the ground, it is apparent that everything is returned to the soil that is abstracted from it. It is, however, material to observe, that if the plant passes through the digestive organs of an animal, it is ground down into minute fragments, and thus prepared to unite more readily with other elements, and to fertilize the soil with more rapidity than if applied in its crude condition. It is combined, moreover, with organic elements which the animal derives from the atmosphere; and what the animal rejects is richer in nitrogen than the food in its original state. For this reason animals are kept stall-fed, in idleness, as food-producing machines.*

*Our Norfolk farmers sometimes feed out a ton of oil-cake a day to their cattle; not to make money by the sale of the cattle, but indirectly, through the richness of the manure obtained by it. In Lancashire there was a large tract of very poor lands, which, thirty years ago, was a com

Professor Norton, at the conclusion of his " Elements of Scientific Agriculture," thus sums up the matter. "We may follow any particular substance in its course from the inanimate soil to the living plant, from the plant to the living and conscious animal, and finally see it return to the soil once more. In all its changes it remains the same in its nature, but is constantly presented to us in new forms. *** There is an endless chain of circulation from the earth up through the plant to the animal, and then again back to the parent earth. By watching this chain, and the various transformations of matter during its course, we may hope to grow constantly wiser in every department of agriculture. We discover that nothing is lost if we burn a piece of wood it disappears, but has merely been converted into carbonic acid and water, both of which are at once ready to enter into new combinations. The animal or the plant dies, and also after a time disappears, but in its decay every particle furnishes food for a new series of living things."

It is now more than half a century since Mr. Malthus published his "Essay on Population," in which he proved - what had been shown before without creating any considerable sensation—that the human race is endowed with such a generative power as to enable it to double its numbers in twenty-five years, and that, although this rate of increase has been seldom attained, if ever, for any long period, yet the natural tendency is to increase in a geometrical ratio. He maintained, on the other hand, that, "considering the present average state of the carth, the means of subsistence, under circumstances the most favourable to human industry, could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetical ratio." He exemplifies the disparate tendencies by saying: "The human species

plete moor, in the middle of which was erected a high tower, so that the traveller might know where he was. This great moor is now reclaimed and cultivated, and pays 20 shillings (sterling) rent annually. But it is kept in this state of cultivation by this high farming. They keep cattle, feed them with oil-cake, and, though the cattle may not be worth half the oil-cake used in feeding, yet they obtain in this way a manure, which enables them to raise barley and wheat crops, sustain their families, pay their rent, and lay by something." - Prof. Johnston's Eighth Lecture before the N. Y. State Agricultural Society: Transactions of 1849, page 249.

would increase as the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256; and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9."

The elder Mill, (Elements of Political Economy, page 56,) using the term capital as including the means of subsistence, and everything else capable of being exchanged for them, states the doctrine which he held in common with Malthus, in these terms:

"It thus sufficiently appears that there is a tendency in population to increase faster than capital. If this be established, it is of no consequence to the present purpose to inquire about the rapidity of the increase. How slow soever the increase of population, provided that of capital is still slower, wages will be reduced so low, that a portion of the population will regularly die of want. Neither can this dreadful consequence be averted otherwise, than by the use of means to prevent the increase of capital from falling short of that of population."

The passage we have marked with italics, is but the necessary logical result of the free operations of the laws of human nature and physical nature, as the latter are conceived by Malthus. Humanity recoils from it, and naturally looks for a remedy in trammelling the conduct of man. Accordingly, in the succeeding

pages of his book, Mr. Mill examines the question, by which course of expedients population and capital can be made to keep pace together, whether by restraining the tendency of population to increase, or by endeavouring "to accelerate beyond its natural pace the increase of capital;" and finally arrives at the conclusion that "human happiness cannot be sccured by taking forcible methods to make capital increase as fast as population," and that "the grand practical problem is, to find the means of limiting the number of births."

The ideas of Mr. Malthus have been adopted, not only by Mr. Mill, but by the great body of British Economists, down to the present day, and, crossing the Channel, they have found acceptance and approval with most of the Continental writers. Various theories, it is truc, have been propounded, for the purpose of showing that the gloomy results which necessarily flow from the principles maintained by him, may be avoided, and that counteracting forces restrain the natural increase of our species. None of them, however, have recognized anything like a natural equilibrium between population and subsistence, if the former, for a long period, should expand at the rate which the native instincts of man, in their normal and

healthy development, would occasion. Instead of burdening the reader with extended quotations in support of this statement, we cite the declaration of the London Times, when announcing the startling fact, proved by the census of 1851, then just completed, that the numbers of the people of Ireland had diminished by 1,659,330 souls in the preceding ten years. "For a whole generation," said the Times, "man has been a drug in this country, and population a nuisance." Repeatedly recurring to the same topic, the sentiment so bluntly expressed in this language, was represented by that journal as the prevailing one among the Economists of Great Britain.

This is not the place for us to examine the course of man's proceeding in the cultivation of the earth, which Mr. Malthus elaborated in his "Principles of Political Economy," published in 1815, as explaining why it is that subsistence increases in a less ratio than population. The doctrine in regard to rent, founded upon that theory, and more generally connected with the name of Mr. Ricardo, will naturally come under review in a subsequent chapter. It is sufficient for the present to observe, that Malthus's theory of the relations between population and subsistence is obviously founded upon the false notion, that man's consumption of food is its destruc tion that having once served the purpose of supporting animal life, its capacity to contribute to that object is absolutely spent and exhausted. The failure to observe that, in the natural course of things it is returned to the earth, to be again formed into food, and resume its office of supporting animal life, is tantamount to this; and it is only in consequence of that failure, that the food-producing power of the soil can be regarded either as a fixed quantity, or as incapable of increasing in the same proportion as the food-consuming power of those who dwell upon it. It may account in part for the tacit adoption of so erroneous an opinion by an intelligent writer, that the discoveries in organic chemistry, which conclusively disprove it, have been made within the last twenty-five years, and are subsequent, by an equal period, to the publication of Mr. Malthus.

If any such exhaustion as that contemplated by Malthus takes place, in consequence of man's subjecting the earth to cultivation, it is obviously because, instead of pursuing the methods dictated by

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Nature, and imitating the operations by which she maintained the fertility of the soil and the interchange of vegetable and animal life, prior to his intervention, he has sought out devices to thwart her laws. But to every law is attached the inevitable penalty of its violation, Death. It executes itself by the destruction of the

offender.

Nature doubtless offers examples of what is called special exhaustion. Different species of plants require very unlike proportions of the several kinds of inorganic food which they derive from the soil. The oak requires much of certain kinds, the pine much of other kinds, and little of those needed by the oak. Accordingly, forests of oak and pine succeed each other alternately, or other alternations occur, depending upon the character of the soil. On the Rhine, between Landau and Kaiser-lautern, oak forests, several centuries old, are seen to be gradually giving way to the beech, while others of oak and beech are yielding to the encroachments of the pine. In our own country we have abundant opportunities of seeing that the second growth of timber differs from that of the original forest to which it succeeds. Nature thus teaches the necessity of a rotation of crops, and the greatest advances in agriculture have been since the lesson has been thoroughly learned.

But Nature nowhere teaches a system which results in continuous and permanent exhaustion, though the Economists of the Malthus school have done so. She offers no examples which should encourage a policy that would make one country the granary and another the workshop of the world. It is not among her plans, that the agriculturists of any nation should be "an exporting interest." If, as we learn from the Agricultural section of the Patent Office Report for 1849, "the farmers of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin export a million tons of breadstuffs and provisions, where they import one ton of the atoms drawn from their virgin soil to form agricultural products," it is to perverse arrangements, for which Nature has no responsibility, and not to any tendency growing out of her laws, that the impoverishment of their territory, and the diminution of its power to sustain human life, is to be ascribed. The same document informs us how it is that Nature compels a restoration of the equilibrium, which disobedience to its