"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

after they have brought to it tolerable tools? Is it not because he had found it impossible to account for the possession of tolerable tools, under the law, and was therefore compelled to postpone the period of its taking effect, until after this difficulty had been surmounted, and the first indispensable infraction of the law taken place?

However convenient, indeed essential, this limitation may be, to make the supposed law capable of holding its place in a system of Political Economy, we apprehend it must remove the law from the canon of Nature. Her enactments are from everlasting, and have never been held in abeyance for a moment, except by the miraculous interposition of their divine author. The notion that they have been suspended from time to time among the various tribes of men, to give them an opportunity of furbishing up some tolerable tools, might not surprise us in a worshipper of Mumbo Jumbo, on the Guinea Coast, but can scarcely have presented itself in the full distinctness of its absurdity to the mind of a philosopher and a Christian.

Mr. Mill continues: "This general law of agricultural industry is the most important proposition in Political Economy. Were the law different, nearly all the phenomena of the production and distribution of wealth would be other than they are."

a

In reference to the importance of the proposition, we concur with him heartily. The disagreement in relation to its truth, and the consequences resulting therefrom, makes the whole difference sufficiently wide one-between the American system, the final issue of which, made axiomatic by the native sense of the people, is rendered in the national aphorism, "population is wealth," and the Economical system of the Old World. We have, as we think, sufficiently proved that the proposition of the Ricardo school finds no foundation in the inherent properties of land. Whether there is anything to uphold it in the laws affecting human labour, we shall now proceed to inquire. The proposition must either find its support in the latter, or it is baseless as a dream.

CO-OPERATION OF NATURAL AGENTS WITH HUMAN LABOUR. 63

CHAPTER III.

THE GRATUITOUS CO-OPERATION OF THE NATURAL AGENTS WITH HUMAN LABOUR.

MAN has been defined a tool-making animal. We nowhere see him working without artificial aid. Even the rudest savages possess some simple implements, which they employ in fishing and hunting, in fabricating their raiment and building their huts. It is difficult, indeed, to conceive man as destitute of every kind of implements. But to arrive at the laws regulating human labour-the contraction of muscular fibre · -as an instrument of production, it is obviously necessary to inquire into its power and action, abstracted from all the other instruments and appliances which habitually concur with it in the execution of work. We can arrive at the laws of the combined action of two forces, only by first understanding those which control their separate action.

We see that, in point of fact, men in every civilized society perform little or nothing in the way of work, without being assisted by the natural agents, such as wood, the motion of water, the expansive power of heat in steam, and, without calling into use, to create the circumstances necessary for the development of these natural powers, a great many mechanical and chemical properties of matter, such as the hardness of steel, the polarity of the magnet, the bleaching quality of chlorine, the velocity of the electric fluid. Most of these qualities, though existing without human agency in the storehouse. of Nature, require artificial combinations to exhibit them, and convert them to economic purposes, as co-workers with human muscle in labor-saving machinery. The number and variety of the agents and qualities that the intellect of a people has discovered, and the extent to which, by mastering their laws, and preparing the necessary conditions for their operation, it has reduced them into service, is the most decisive test of its civilization.

There must have been a brief period, in which our first progenitor used only his senses and his muscles to furnish himself with food.