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settlement, is from the less productive to the more productive soils, and of course from feebleness and poverty to wealth and power.

It is very remarkable that a fact of so striking a character, and involving so important consequences, should never have been observed, or if observed never have been announced, as universally occurring in the history of every community, until it was announced by Mr. Carey, in "The Past, the Present, and the Future," pub-\ lished in 1848, and marking that year as a new era in the annals of Political Economy. He establishes it as a law of Nature, a portion, and a fundamental one, of the great law of progress and improvement. It had not merely escaped the attention of all Economists previous to Mr. Carey, but for nearly forty years the whole body of them in England, and the greater portion upon the Continent, had believed, and many still continue to believe, that the fact and the law are directly the reverse of those stated by him.

In 1815, Mr. Malthus published his "Essay on the Nature and Progress of Rent." The theory there broached had indeed been several years previously presented by Mr. Anderson, and Mr. West also published a pamphlet, containing substantially the same views, so nearly contemporaneous with that of Malthus, that each is believed to have been ignorant of the ideas of the other, as well as those of Anderson. The theory has, however, become connected with the name of Malthus, and still more with that of Ricardo, who shortly afterwards made it the basis of a system, and elaborated the deductions legitimately to be drawn from it, with a skill that has dwarfed the honours of the original authors. We prefer therefore to present it in the words of Mr. Ricardo.

"On the first settling of a country in which there is an abundance of rich and fertile land, a very small portion of which is required to be cultivated for the support of the actual population, or, indeed, can be cultivated with the capital which the population can command, there will be no rent: for no one would pay for the use of land, when there was an abundant quantity not yet appropriated, and, therefore, at the disposal of whomsoever might choose to cultivate it. * * * * * If all land had the same properties, if it were boundless in quantity and uniform in quality, no charge could be made for its use, unless where it possessed peculiar advantages of situation. It is only, then, because land is not unlimited in quantity and uniform in quality, and because, in the progress of population land of an inferior quality, or less advantageously situated, is called into cultivation, that rent is ever paid for the use of it. When, in the progress of society, land of the second degree of fertility is taken into

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cultivation, rent immediately commences on that of the first quality; and the amount of that rent will depend on the difference in the quality of these two portions of land. When land of the third quality is taken into cultivation, rent immediately commences on the second; and it is regulated as before by the difference in their productive powers. At the same time the rent of the first quality will rise, for that must always be above the rent of the second, by the difference between the produce which they yield with a given quantity of capital and labour. With every step

in the progress of population, which shall oblige a country to have recourse to land of a worse quality to enable it to raise its supply of food, rent on all the more fertile land will rise.

"Thus, suppose land-No. 1, 2, 3-to yield, with an equal employment of capital and labour, a net produce of 100, 90, and 80 quarters of corn. In a new country, where there is an abundance of fertile land compared with the population, and where, therefore, it is only necessary to cultivate No. 1, the whole net produce will belong to the cultivator, and will be the profits of the stock which he advances. As soon as population had so far increased as to make it necessary to cultivate No. 2, from which 90 quarters only can be obtained, after supporting the labourers, rent would commence on No. 1; for either there must be two rates of profit of an agricultural capital, or 10 quarters, or the value of 10 quarters, must be withdrawn from the produce of No. 1 for some other purpose. Whether the proprietor of the land, or some other person, cultivate No. 1, these 10 quarters would equally constitute rent; for the cultivator of No. 2 would get the same result from his capital, whether he cultivated No. 1, paying 10 quarters for rent, or continued to cultivate No. 2, paying no rent. In the same manner, it might be shown that when No. 3 is brought into cultivation, the rent of No. 2 must be 10 quarters, or the value of 10 quarters, whilst the rent of No. 1 would rise to 20 quarters; for the cultivator of No. 3 would have the same profits, whether he paid 20 quarters for the rent of No. 1, 10 quarters for the rent of No. 2, or cultivated No. 3 free of all rent."

Such is the theory known as the Ricardo Doctrine of Rent, and vaunted as the greatest contribution to the Science of Political Economy since the days of Adam Smith. The only aspect of it in which we are at present interested, is that it assumes as an unquestionable fact, that the lands first subjected to cultivation are those of the highest fertility, and that in the progress of society men are continually forced to resort to those of an inferior productiveness. It furnished Mr. Malthus with a ready explanation of the supposed tendency in population to increase at a more rapid rate than the means of subsistence. If it be true, each generation must obtain food with increasing difficulty, a greater proportion of the time and labour of each must be devoted to the satisfaction of the primary want, to maintaining the mere vegetable existence of the race; and a continually decreasing proportion of the time and labour of each will be left available for the mechanic arts, or any other species of industry not aiming directly at the production of food. Such would

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.

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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.

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