In regard to France, the following statement is contained in the article, Agriculture, in the Dictionnaire d'Economie Politique, contributed by H. Passy:

"The official statistics present contrasts singularly striking. If we compare the figures relating to the ten richest and most populous Departments with those relating to the ten Departments which are the least so, it will be found that in the former the average yield of a hectare (2.47 acres,) is from 15 to 20 hectolitres (the hectolitre is 2-84 bushels,) of wheat, while in the latter it is only from 7 to 11, and that there is an equal disproportion in all the other products. In regard to consumption they offer a difference equally marked. The food is not only superior in quality in the advanced Departments, it is also superior in quantity, and, head for head, the consumption is thirty per cent. more in weight than in the less dense and poorer Departments."

This difference is attributed by Mons. Passy to the stimulant which agricultural skill derives from the greater markets in the populous Departments. This implies that there is no general diversity in the quality of the soils in the Departments compared, while it is certain that in those most densely populated, if the hypothesis of Ricardo is correct, a larger proportion of the inferior soils must be cultivated.

We may bring the question to another test, by comparing two long-settled countries. That in which the largest proportion of territory remains in forests, should, according to the hypothesis, be that whose population has, in the least proportion, been compelled to resort to soils of inferior fertility. Trying England and France by this criterion, the latter has, in proportion to its extent, a fourfold larger quantity of forest land; it constituting in England but the twenty-fourth part, while in France one-sixth of the surface is covered with woods.*

France has certainly the general advantage over England in soil and climate, and if it cultivates a less proportion of the relatively poor soil, the average gross produce per acre ought to be larger. But the reverse is notoriously true. One-third only of the population of England was engaged in agricultural labour previous to the Repeal of the Corn Laws; and when the importation of food was so trifling as not to sensibly affect the result, this one-third produced food for the whole nation. In France, on the contrary, two-thirds

* Dictionnaire de l'Economie Politique, article Forets.

of the people were agriculturists. In one country two men raised food for six; in the other, it required four to effect the same object.. The diet of the French people, moreover, is greatly inferior both in quantity and quality to that of the English, sufficiently so to counterbalance any allowance that ought to be made, for an excess in its exportation of agricultural products over that of England.

The absolute failure of the facts to confirm the hypothesis, is endeavoured to be accounted for by the suggestion that greater labour, and the aid of increased capital and improved machinery, are the sources of the great return in the one instance, and their absence that of the small return in the other. Thus, J. S. Mill, (Polit. Econ., vol. 1, page 219,) finding himself compelled to admit that experience is against the doctrine, and that unquestionably a much smaller proportion of the population is now occupied in producing food than in the early times of our history, argues, "This, however, does not prove that the law, of which we have been speaking, does not exist, but only that there is some antagonizing principle at work, capable for a time of making head against the law. Such an agency there is, in habitual antagonism to the law of diminishing return from land; and to the consideration of this we shall now proceed. It is no other than the progress of civilization. I use this general and somewhat vague expression, because the things to be included are so various, that hardly any term of a more restricted signification would comprehend them all." He proceeds to enumerate improved processes in agriculture, improved roads and other means of communication, mechanical improvements and improvements in education, as effective elements, counteracting the law of deterioration in the productive powers of the soil. These, and others of the like nature, he regards as forces which may impede for a season the operation of the natural law; but he comes to the necessary conclusion, that a law constantly operating, must, surely, in the end produce its due effect in the words of M'Culloch, that "from the operation of fixed and permanent causes, the increasing sterility of the soil is sure, in the long run, to overmatch the improvements that occur in machinery and cultivation."

When Mr. Mill, in his "System of Logic," was investigating the methods applicable to social science, he declared that,

THEIR ADAPTATION TO OCCUPATION AND CULTURE.

"In order to prove that our science, and our knowledge of the particular case, renders us competent to predict the future, we must show that they would have enabled us to predict the present and the past. If there be anything which we could not have predicted, this constitutes a residual phenomenon, requiring further study for the purpose of explanation; and we must either search among the circumstances of the particular case until we find one, which, on the principles of our existing theory accounts for the unexplained phenomenon, or we must turn back, and seek the explanation by an extension and improvement of the theory itself."

as the

The existence of those agencies which Mr. Mill sums up in the expression, "the progress of civilization," is such a phenomenon. When it is asserted to be coexisting with a law of Nature progressive deterioration of the land taken into cultivation is averred to be-it must either be accounted for by the theory which assumes that law to exist and to be constantly active, or the theory itself must be revised.

Now, how is it possible to explain the acquisition of more extensive and improved machinery, by men who, beginning with the smallest quantity of it, and the poorest quality, are continually under the necessity of devoting more and more time and labour to procure a supply of food just adequate to maintain life? It is not enough that they should have such aid, but it must be had in a proportion increasing more rapidly than their increased numbers. The table given on page 55, will serve to elucidate this necessity. At the first stage, we have each hundred individuals in the community obtaining, upon an average, nine bushels of wheat, the quantity usually assumed as the average consumption of Englishmen. In point of fact, we know that this is a much larger quantity than fell to the share of an individual in the early periods of that country's history, or of any other country's. Habitual insufficiency and occasional famine, has always been the lot of men at the commencement of cultivation. But the quantity set down in the table may stand as the representative of that which is merely adequate to scanty subsistence. It is a question of proportion and not of absolute amount, and, therefore, one figure will serve for illustration as well as another. At the third stage, after the expiration of fifty years, the population has quadrupled, and in the meantime the average quantity of food which the deteriorating soils brought under cultivation will produce, has fallen to 7-875, a diminution of 12 per cent., or one-eighth. If we suppose that eighty out of the hundred were able, during the

first stage, to raise food for the whole, leaving the other twenty to construct and repair tools, clothing, &c., during the third stage it will require the labour of one-eighth more, or of ninety persons in the hundred, to produce food, leaving but ten available for industry of other kinds. It should require even more than ninety, for, according to the hypothesis, the ten extra husbandmen must apply themselves to worse lands than their eighty fellows cultivate. But, granting that ninety should prove as effective as eighty of their grandfathers had done, what is the warrant for anticipating that ten artizans will be able to keep ninety husbandmen as well supplied with utensils, clothing, houses, &c., as eighty were, two generations before, kept furnished by the labour of twenty artizans? Where each artizan in the first stage accomplished a mass of work represented by 4, (8), his successor in the third stage must perform the equivalent of 9, (8). Doing this, if he can, he will do his share towards maintaining a merely stationary condition of society, or rather would do so, if it were not that the law of the "increasing sterility of the soil" is constantly making greater demands upon him, as the community is carried along with the progress of time towards the fourth stage, with a still further decline in agricultural production. But his task does not end even here. As food, in point of fact, is found to have increased in a much greater ratio than population, in order that this increase should be explained, the artizan of the past must have contributed to it, either by his own direct labour, in the leisure moments remaining to him after completing the work we have just shown to be required of him, to prevent a falling off in the supply, or indirectly, by improving and adding to the quantity of the machinery of tillage.

Now, we certainly are not authorized to pronounce it impossible, that mere agricultural labour should have done all that this theory requires of it. But if it were established as an independent fact, that mechanical power has, in the progress of society, increased according to any given series of numbers, or any imaginable law of increment, it would still tend to disprove any supposed law of Nature, that instead of accounting for that increase, it creates the difficulty of accounting for it. It is manifestly against the principles of sound reasoning, to support a theory against the evidence of

facts inconsistent with it, by arguing that they are the consequence of another series of facts equally inconsistent with it. The law must be broad enough to comprehend them all, and explain them all, or it must be discarded as a false conjecture, which Nature disowns; for all her laws are invariable, irresistible, and harmonious.

The theory of Mr. Carey reconciles all the facts, and explains them all. It is possible for food to increase more rapidly than population, when men begin with the inferior soils, and, as their numbers grow, pass to those of superior fertility. An increasing proportion of each community is thus released from direct employment in the raising of food, and enabled to apply its energies to the preparation of machinery and the improvement of processes. These give the ability to the husbandman to reap a larger return from his old soil, and to overcome more readily and effectually the difficulties which attend his subduing the new and richer lands. The result is necessarily a larger yield, in recompense of the same amount of labour, a further increase in the surplus of food, and the setting free of more labourers from the farm, to recruit the workshops and to undertake fresh branches of industry. Upon this theory we can comprehend the progress of civilization; it is the foreseen and certain result of a permanent law. Upon the other, it is an accidental and embarrassing fact, for which we can discover no cause in the past, no guarantee for the future.

Mr. John Stuart Mill gives the doctrine we have been examining in these terms:

"After a certain and not very advanced stage in the progress of agriculture; as soon, in fact, as men have applied themselves to cultivation with any energy, and have brought to it any tolerable tools; from that time it is the law of production from the land, that in any given state of agricultural skill and knowledge, by increasing the labour, the produce is not increased in an equal degree; doubling the labour does not double the produce; or, to express the same thing in other words, every increase of produce is obtained by a more than proportional increase in the application of labour to the land."-Polit. Econ. vol. 1, page 214.

The cautious limitations contained in this paragraph would seem to imply, that some of the difficulties we have just stated had occurred to the author of this passage: How comes it, otherwise, that the law is announced as not coming into operation until after a somewhat, if not very, advanced stage in the progress of agriculture, after they have applied themselves to cultivation with energy, and