MIDDLE AND WESTERN STATES.

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most profitable things he can put his hand to, and his less-knowing neighbors stare at the crops that follow.

New Jersey was preferred by the first Quaker settlers to the west bank of the Delaware, because of the abundance of her light, sandy soils, which were the more easily got at. Hundreds of their clearings, which have long been abandoned, may be found in these districts. The Swedes across the river followed suit. They built Christina, Lewistown, and other towns of Delaware that have become decayed and insignificant places.

§ 112. Penn had the same preference for high land. His first choice for the site of Philadelphia was twelve miles farther north. The early maps of the province show us miles of small farms running from the city along the tops of the ridges, while the richer and lower lands on each side are marked as uncleared and uncultivated. Hence the origin of the Ridge Road. A large part of the banks of our rivers above the city, are still unsafe as building-sites, while below us lie undrained swamps that will yet be the farm-gardens of our city. Much of the best land in the interior of the state is still unoccupied, especially in the valley of the Susquehanna, while comparatively barren places on the slopes of the Alleghenies and its related ranges were settled at a very early date. The old roads of the state go twisting about as if in search of hills to clamber along-even in the limestone valleys, where there is no malaria-while the new ones run along the streams and through the valleys.

The vast immigration from the north of Ireland that went on during last century found homes in the Alleghenies and their spurs, which they entered through Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and then spread over the whole Apalachian system from what are now the Oil Regions to Huntsville in Northern Alabama. Their choice was not prompted by want of better lands,for such lay unreclaimed on both sides of the mountains;-nor by indolence (as Mr. Burton charges upon the Irish settlers of the Scotch Highlands), for no race is more industrious ;—nor by any special safety of their position, as they had to bear for half a century the brunt of our Indian wars. They took the lands

that lay most open to them, as did their brethren, who passed by Maine to settle the Granite State.

§ 113. The same course of settlement may be traced in every Western state. Everywhere the rich valley-lands are avoided. as the seat of malaria. In Wisconsin the first settlement was made in the patch of highlands called the Blue Mound, and the lines of settlement ran out along the sandy hills as in the east. The richest and the most fertile spots on the prairies were in earlier times the sloughs or "wet prairies "—the terror of travellers, but now under combined and patient exertion "fair as the garden of the Lord." One such in Southern Illinois, occupied by Paisley weavers turned American farmers, recalls the most carefully tilled bits of the British Islands. This whole district, commonly known as Egypt, and spreading from the Mississippi far east of the Wabash, is perhaps the richest in the whole North. Yet the Southern planters on their way to occupy Missouri, passed it by in disdain, and left it to " poor whites" of the South, who occupy such dry and sandy ridges as they find accessible, where the rudest agriculture suffices to supply their very primitive wants. The rich creek bottoms are inaccessible to its rude and scanty population, who have hardly any notion of their value and no capital sufficient to master them. whose lands if rightly tilled would feed a New England town, will live in a log-hut of two rooms, with a loom and spinningwheel on the "stoop," and ride to a Hard Shell church, with a saddle of raw hide and stirrups of straw. Every family has its package of quinine, and "the Egyptian shakes" are a proverb.

A man,

If we ascend the various branches of the Mississippi, we find tillage approaching the river if the population is dense, receding from the river to the barer lands that furnish natural drainage if it be sparse.

Descending the river we reach the vast levees that protect the richest plantations of the continent and testify to the growth of man's power to command the services of nature with the increase of numbers. East of this southern valley lie the South Atlantic States. In North Carolina the richest lands are still

undrained, while labor is expended upon others that yield from three to five bushels of wheat to the acre. The Cotton States contain millions of acres still inaccessible to agriculture through lack of population, because a large outlay of intelligently directed labor would be required to occupy them.

In Texas the first Spanish colony at Bexar and the first American colony at Austin, high up on the Colorado, were both settled by men, who passed by millions of acres of better land as inaccessible, to reach an exceptional elevation.

§ 114. Looking at the entire area of the earth's surface, we find (1) that no nation occupies a territory incapable of supporting its actual or even its probable population. Norway comes nearest to forming an exception, but the Scandinavian peninsula is manifestly designed for the home of one nationality. Sweden raises more cereals than her people eat, and a very considerable area of her arable lands is still covered with dense forests. England is clearly no exception; she is capable of producing on her soil four times as much food as her people use; but her agriculture lags far behind the general average of her skill in the invention of better methods and in the application of scientific principles.

(2) The pressure of population upon subsistence and upon the land exists in sparsely-settled regions, and there only. It is a providential agency to stir men to greater exertions and wiser methods, and these exertions are always abundantly rewarded.

(3) The richest areas of the earth's surface lie still unoccupied, and in many cases the richest districts, within national boundaries whose population is dense enough to take possession of them, are untilled and undrained.

(4) The area of culture may be indefinitely extended in both directions. It is now-we may say--the belt of land that lies between districts that are too poor and districts that are too rich to repay culture. The former as well as the latter may be mastered, as the sciences advance in their mastery of the secrets of nature; chalk downs and sandy deserts may be transformed into fair garden fields and orchards at the touch of man, as great

natural forces and resources are brought into his service. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.

(5) The value of the land of a country is chiefly-or in truth entirely due to the labor that has been wisely expended upon it, and is proportional to that. The price of a Belgian farm, for instance, is twelve times as great as that of the same amount of waste land in the same country, and the latter brings even that nominal price only because (1) it furnishes a field for labor to produce utilities possible but as yet non-existent; (2) because the labor already expended on other adjacent pieces of land, and the growth of numbers and of the power of association, have made it possible to bring this one under tillage. Were the same piece of land to be transferred to the Andes, its market value would be nil.

In fine, if in any case a people, with the strength of numbers and the strength of skill, should come to such a state that great wealth should be found side by side with deep poverty and its accompaniments, misery and sordid vice, the cause of such a state of things is not to be sought in "the pressure of population upon land and food," but in bad national thrift. Somebody is to blame!

CHAPTER SEVENTH.

THE NATIONAL ECONOMY OF LABOR.

§ 115. The industrial age, in which national economy has become a science, is also the democratic age, in which the governing class are no longer regarded as composing the state or possessing an exclusive right to direct its policy to the promotion of their own interests. It is no longer possible, therefore, to call a nation wealthy and prosperous because large masses of capital are in the hands of a few men, if the great body of the people are ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-clothed, or struggling on the brink of pauperism. The prosperity of "the most numerous class, that is, the poorest," is coming ever more to the front as the great problem of modern statesmanship.

In an industrial age this problem resolves itself into the question of the rewards of labor. Modern governments can no longer undertake to support great numbers of people in idleness on the produce of the industry of other classes, as was done in the Greek republics and the Roman Empire. Those others, with the advance of political equality, claim equal rights and care. The aim of national economy is therefore to secure “a fair day's wages for a fair day's work," to all who are willing and able to work.

In modern industry, the operations are so complex in method and so extensive in scale that unassisted labor would be unable to undertake them. Those who by their savings, or by the inheritance of other men's savings, have come into the possession of a large amount of the results of past labor, naturally and necessarily take the work of organizing industry and directing its forces. These men are capitalists, and their accumulations are called capital.

§ 116. Of the net product of the joint application of labor and capital, what proportion should fall to labor and what to