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waves on this great ocean of God's own beautiful sod are the 'sloughs,' the terror of the early 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.

theories of Ricardo and Carey, in the meetings of the PoliticoEconomical Society at Paris, reports of which are published in the Journal des Economistes, a magazine which is the organ of the leading writers on this subject, of the French nation, and which is read by students in this science throughout Europe. Indeed, the savans of several continental countries have taken part, orally at the meetings of the Society, and by communications in the pages of the Journal, in the debate. Mr. Carey himself intervened, and in articles over his signature, in the Journal, has challenged any one to name a single country in which the fact has not been as represented by him, or a single country in which, when population and wealth have decreased, men have not abandoned the most fertile and receded to inferior lands-as in India, where once-populous districts on the plains have relapsed into jungle, tenanted by wild beasts, while their former inhabitants cluster on the hill-sides-as in Italy, where every excavation in the marshes, now sterile, and desolate from malaria, discovers the traces of ancient works for drainage, which once made them salubrious and fertile.

While the controversy has proceeded upon collateral points, and in reference to the validity of deductions from this fact or its opposite fiction, no one has accepted the issue of fact, and Mr. Carey stands uncontradicted, by enlightened and skilful disputants, who, in respect to the course of things, in France especially, have much more ample means for finding a seeming exception than he has for disproving or explaining it.

The indirect demonstration of the falsity of Ricardo's hypothesis is equally conclusive. The consequences that should infallibly attend it, if it were true, are contradicted by experience. About some of these it is as yet premature to inquire. The most obvious, however, is this. If the Ricardo doctrine is correct, we ought to find each generation less amply provided with food, and procuring it with a greater expenditure of labour than its predecessor. The more distant the periods contrasted, the more marked should be the disparity. If we assume that population proceeds at the highest rate of rapidity assumed by Malthus, and that the lands successively taken into cultivation diminish in fertility according to the scale which Ricardo gives by way of illustration, the state of things will

be this: A territory producing 100 quarters (say 900 bushels, at 60 pounds to the bushel,) of wheat, and affording a supply of food for one hundred persons, may be taken as a sample of a whole country and its people. At the expiration of twenty-five years, the population will have doubled, and the hundred new recruits will require an equal territory to that occupied by the original hundred. This territory, according to the scale of progression given for the purpose of illustration by Ricardo, will produce but 90 quarters of wheat, or 810 bushels. The whole amount to be divided between 200 persons will now be but 190 quarters, or 1710 bushels. At the expiration of fifty years the population will have doubled again, and there will be 200 recruits demanding fresh land. They will have to content themselves with that of the third quality, producing but 80 quarters upon the space which formerly rendered 100, or 160 quarters instead of 200, which their two hundred forefathers obtained. In seventy-five years the population will have doubled again, amounting in the aggregate to 800 persons; and the last 400 must occupy land of the 4th quality, producing but 70 quarters instead of 100 upon an equal space, or for a space originally adequate to the support of 400 persons, 280 quarters, or 2520 bushels instead of 3600. The facts may be arranged in tabular form, as follows:

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Such, upon the hypothesis, would be the progress of things in two hundred years. Population would have multiplied two hundred and fifty-six times, food but eighty times; so that, upon an equal partition, each person would obtain a little less than one-third as much food as his ancestors enjoyed two centuries before. The com

munity, to procure the same average quantity of food as its progenitors, would require three times as much land in proportion to its numbers, and thus, in the same degree be dispersed over greater spaces, and placed at greater distances from each other.

It would not be fair to insist that just such a progression as we have traced ought to be shown to have taken place somewhere, and at some time, in order to support the hypothesis of Ricardo and Malthus. But something like it should be produced; a decreasing series in the average quantity of food, the terms of which converge with less rapidity, and cover a longer period of time, but still exhibit a positive and marked law of diminution, ought to be shown to have existed in the history of some nation. The fact, however, is precisely the reverse; and that fact is not disputed by Economists who accept and inculcate the Ricardo doctrine. Mr. M'Culloch says speaking of England: "Let any one compare the state of this or any other European country 500, or 100 years ago, and he will be satisfied that prodigious advances have been made, that the means of subsistence have increased much more rapidly than the population, and that the labouring classes are now generally in the possession of conveniences and luxuries that were formerly not enjoyed, even by the richest lords." Mr. Senior, writing in 1836, says: "Since the beginning of the 18th century the population of England has about doubled. The produce of the land has certainly tripled, probably quadrupled." It would be easy to multiply quotations to the same effect, but these suffice, in reference to a fact, which, so far at least as it relates to modern times, nobody disputes, and which we shall hereafter have occasion to demonstrate by particular statistical estimates. The farther back we go, and the longer period we embrace, the more favourable should the comparison be to the hypothesis; yet, we shall find it even more signally discountenanced by the facts. The great frequency of famines in the earlier periods of English history, and when almost the entire population was employed in agricultural labour, is conclusive evidence of the smallness of the crops. In the Saxon Chronicle, in which the occurrences of each year are given in the form of annals, they recur with startling brevity of intervals.*

* See the Pictorial History of England, Vol. I., page 266; also 579.

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