tributes more largely than capital to the value of the commodity; and unfortunately, the number of these is every day diminishing, because the progress of invention and the improvement of machinery tend inevitably to mass the business of production in vast establishments, which require an immense capital, and easily crush out, or outlive, small enterprises. In New England, for instance, within a quarter of a century, the invention of powerpresses, sewing-machines, and almost countless contrivances for abridging manual labor in manufactures from iron and leather, have brought together into monster workshops the printers, tailors, shoemakers, and blacksmiths, who formerly plied their trades one by one, or in small parties.

Another obstacle to the success of co-operative associations arises from the difficulty of securing competent head management. The direction of a large business generally demands great sagacity and foresight, perfect acquaintance with the markets, and familiarity with a mass of mechanical, pecuniary, and administrative details. These qualities are not often found united in one person, as is proved by the frequency of failures and bankruptcies; and even when they exist, they are not likely to be fully developed and exerted, except under some stronger stimulus of self-interest than is afforded by the receipt of a good salary or a small fraction of the profits. Committees of management are proverbially negligent or meddlesome, inharmonious and unsuccessful: one executive head, and a very able one, is an essential prerequisite of success in any large undertaking.

It must be expected, then, that there will be the same alternations of failure with success in the business of combined workmen, as in that of individual capitalists. It is for the workman himself to judge, whether he will quit the security of his present position for the heavy risks and doubtful advantages of an active share in the business. At present, he is guarantied against loss. The workman's wages are his share of the average profit and loss commuted into a fixed payment. "The capitalist alone endures all the losses, alone furnishes all the advances, alone encounters the risk of ruin, and receives only what profits may remain after the laborer's commuted share is paid. The workman's share is a first mortgage; the capitalist's share is only a reversionary claim." Under the light of the experiments which have thus far been

made, perhaps the best advice which can be given is, that the employed should continue in the receipt of moderate wages, and that the manager-capitalist should, for his own sake as well as for that of the other parties concerned, promote harmony, prevent strikes, and encourage diligence and fidelity, by annexing to the wages one third or one half of whatever surplus profits there may be over such a rate per cent as would be an average income on ordinary investments. The probable result will then be, as in the case of the Briggs collieries, that the proprietor's share, after this deduction, will be greater than it would have been had no such deduction been made.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY OF POPULATION CONSIDERED AND REFUTED: THE TRUE LAW OF THE INCREASE OF POPULATION.

THE laws of Political Economy, for the most part, are inferences from the general fact that individuals compete with each other in the pursuit of wealth. Rents, Profits, Wages, Prices, are determined by competition; and as we are able to foresee what the effects of competition will be, we can show how these things will vary under given circumstances. Thus, Profits tend to an equality in all employments, because capitalists compete with each other, and will withdraw their capital from a business which is less profitable, to invest it in one which is more so; this influx of capital into the more lucrative employment soon reduces the rate of profit in it to a level with the Profits in other employments. The Price of an article, of which there is a given quantity in the market, is determined by the Demand for it, that is, by the competition of the buyers. And this Demand, again, regulates the future Supply of that article; for, as the competition of the buyers becomes warm, the Price is enhanced, the Profits of those who produce the article are increased, more capital is attracted into the employment, the Supply is enlarged, and the Price falls again.

These principles are sufficiently obvious; and if there were not

exceptional cases, if their application was not modified and restricted by a crowd of circumstances, Political Economy might be called a demonstrative, or even an intuitive, science. Its maxims might all be taken for granted, and men would act upon them without giving themselves the trouble of enunciating them in an abstract form. But there are numerous exceptions and modifying circumstances, which need to be carefully considered; and in this chapter I propose to examine the most important of them.

There are two things the Supply of which is not regulated by the Demand; and they are two very important things, namely, Land and Population. Our wants and our desires do not, in these two cases, create, or even tend to create, the means of satisfying them; those means are wholly beyond our control. We cannot increase the quantity of surface of the habitable globe; we cannot, at will, either enlarge the Population, or put limits to its growth, except by transgressing the moral laws which guard the sanctity of human life. It is conceivable that the well-being of a community may be greatly affected by these two inexorable facts. With all its labor and ingenuity, it cannot materially enlarge the limits of its territory, except by robbing its neighbors; it may reclaim a little land from the waters along the margin of a river, a lake, or an ocean; but it is obvious that its power in this respect is restricted within very narrow limits. And if its Population should begin to waste away, or to increase with undue and inconvenient rapidity, the will of a monarch or the wishes of a people would not suffice to arrest either its decline or its growth. Still they are dependent for food upon the products of the Land, the amount of which products must finally be limited by the extent of surface of the earth.

On this possible or conceivable increase of the numbers of mankind, united with the fact that the cultivable surface of the earth is a fixed quantity, which cannot be enlarged, is founded the celebrated theory of Mr. Malthus. We are not at liberty to put aside the discussion of this doctrine, as if it were a mere speculation, which can have no practical importance except in a contingency certainly very remote, and which may never be realized. It is dwelt upon and applied by nearly all the English Economists as if it were a truth of great moment. The whole subject of Politital Economy is colored with it; it affects the doctrine of Rent,

Profits, and Wages, and leads to inferences in respect to each of them, which otherwise would be immediately rejected.

The followers of Malthus are somewhat dogmatic in their enun ciation of the doctrine, and altogether impatient of any doubt of its correctness. This positiveness arises from a perception of the unquestionable correctness of the data on which the theory is founded; while the general reluctance to accept it proceeds from involuntary dread of the shocking conclusions that it has been made to support, and from disgust at the consequences of its practical application. The doctrine of Malthus is sometimes understood, in its extended sense, to comprise the whole body of these inferences from it, together with its application as advice for the government of men's conduct and the regulation of society; and when it is thus understood, the common sense and natural feelings of mankind shrink from it with that strong aversion which the supporters of the theory stigmatize as "sentimental horror." Taken in the more restricted meaning, always used by believers in the theory when it is controverted or denied, Malthusianism contains only one or two truisms about the law of increase that is common to the human race with the whole animal creation, which have no practical importance whatever, except for the purpose to which they were first applied by Malthus himself, - namely, to confute an absurd speculation by Godwin as to the perfectibility of the social state. Upon this ambiguity of meaning depends the whole controversy as to the law of Population and its consequences upon the well-being of society.

The proposition upon which the whole theory rests is this, that the power of increase of any race of animals, the human species included, is indefinite, or incapable of exhaustion; and if it were exercised to the utmost, without any check from external circumstances or from the animal's power of self-control, the earth would not be large enough, I do not say merely to afford subsistence, but even to give standing-room, to the beings who would claim a place upon it. The capacity of increase necessarily acts in a geometrical progression; for, each pair being capable of procreation, if a people, under certain circumstances, increase within thirty years from ten thousand to twenty thousand, a mere continuance of the same cause and the same circumstances would enlarge the number, within the next thirty years, to forty thousand; and the third period would

carry it to eighty thousand. For example, a given rate of increase, in the ten years from 1790 to 1800, added but 1,200,000 to the white Population of this country; but from 1830 to 1840, the same rate of increase added 3,600,000. The Population was more than doubled from 1790 to 1820; it was again more than doubled from 1820 to 1850. But the former doubling added less than five millions to our numbers, while the latter doubling added over ten millions; and the next doubling, in 1880, will add twenty millions.

This law of possible increase in a geometrical progression belongs to every species, both of the animal and vegetable kingdom, of which we have any knowledge; it is an immediate and logical inference from the self-evident fact that every pair, whether of the earliest or the latest generation, whether forming part of a very small, or a very numerous, community, is equally capable of continuing and multiplying its kind. Its prolific power is not at all affected by the greater or smaller number of its fellow-creatures which may be already in existence. If Population should go on in this manner without check, it is evident that, within a few centuries, the earth might literally be overstocked with human beings: if they should stand shoulder to shoulder, as thickly as the stalks of wheat in a cultivated field at harvest-time, there would still be a call for room; for the next thirty years would inevitably double even this immense assemblage.

Observe that this law of increase by geometrical progression holds good, whether the annual rate of increase be fast or slow. In the United States, for instance, the annual rate, exclusive of the effects of immigration, is 2.39 per cent, and, as a consequence, the Population is doubled in little over 32 years. In France, the annual rate is but 0.6, and the Population, therefore, is not doubled in less than 115 years. Still, it will be doubled in that time; and therefore, in 230 years it will be quadrupled; thus following the law of increase by geometrical progression, if it increase at all. The theory of Malthus may be said to owe its plausibility, in great part, to the fact with which all arithmeticians. are familiar, that a number, increasing by geometrical progression, within a few terms rises to a very formidable amount.

Mr. Malthus further undertakes to show, that the means of subsistence, under the most favorable circumstances, cannot increase