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the densely-settled Saltillo and Potosi, the former a series of sandy plains, the latter a land without rivers, where the failure. of the periodical rains occasions severe famines. In this high and dry central plateau the population is chiefly concentrated, while the richer lands between that and the coast, where vegetation is luxuriant and rivers abundant, lie still uncleared. The valley of Mexico was once an exception, but under Spanish misrule and exaction its forty cities disappeared and tillage has retreated to the higher lands, which now supply its single city with food.

So rich Honduras contrasts with barren but populous Yucatan, where water is a luxury; and the comparison might be extended to the whole region of Central and South America. The rich valley of the Amazon, where vegetation grows with a luxuriance that recalls the geological ages of the past, is still inaccessible to human agriculture through that very wealth, and is left to the monkeys and a few degraded tribes of Indians. Humboldt being struck with the beauty of a little vine that he found there a pretty graceful bit of green a few inches in length,―marked its site by "blazing" a neighboring tree, as he intended to take it with him on his way back a few months later. When he returned, it had grown sixty feet into that tree; he left it there.

§ 129. 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 are 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!

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CHAPTER SEVENTH.

THE NATIONAL ECONOMY OF LABOR.

§ 130. 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 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.

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

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capital? Is there a natural and necessary rate of distribution, or does it vary arbitrarily according to the contract made?

The English economists generally accept the former alternative; they believe that there is a natural and necessary rate of wages; that no efforts of the workman can permanently raise wages above that rate, and no efforts of the capitalist can permanently depress them below it. For, say they, if wages be raised above the natural rate, the rate of increase in the population will be accelerated, and after a time the number of workmen will be so great that they will underbid each other for work, and the rate will be depressed again. If it be depressed below the natural rate by this or any other cause, then the rate of increase of the population will be diminished, and the labor market will be scantily supplied, so that wages must rise. Between the two extremes of this oscillation, there is a middle point of stability, —the natural rate of wages, that which will neither accelerate the growth of population till it surpasses the growth of capital, nor the reverse. This natural rate is the amount necessary to supply to the unmarried workman the real necessaries of life, and whatever other things his class regard as such.

The theory is commonly stated in another form, which also accepts a natural rate of wages, and one which is reached far more swiftly. All the money in a country that is available for the payment of labor is taken in the mass and called the wage fund. This fund is divided pretty equally among all the laborers in the country. The apparent inequalities in the distribution are not real; higher wages can always be traced to payment for undergoing danger or doing work that is disagreeable or discreditable, or work that involves special capacity or preparation. The amount of the fund to be divided depends upon the amount of capital in circulation. The rate of division depends upon the number of claimants. The workingmen have. no power to increase the amount of the fund, but they can limit the number of those among whom it is divided, and on their doing so depends their welfare as a class.

This theory in both its shapes grows out of the supposed

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"law of population," and must stand or fall with that. Like that, its motive is to show that the misery of the working classes is not to be attributed to any mismanagement on the part of the ruling class, but to the operation of natural and unavoidable laws. Its verdict is, "Nobody to blame," when the growth of a nation in wealth and numbers, and the distribution of wealth among those numbers, do not go on together.

The first form of the theory is fully refuted by the ascertained fact that the poorest classes are the most thriftless, and the least likely to take thought for the future. The second, by the proofs that workingmen actually have, by combination, raised the rate of wages, without any such increase of circulating capital, or the resulting "wage fund," as is here demanded. as a preliminary to that increase.

The facts are abundantly given by Mr. W. T. Thornton (On Labor, 1870), and by Mr. Cliffe Leslie (Systems of Land Tenure, 1868). § 132. If the English theory as to the relations of labor and capital is true, then there is no hope for the essential improvement of the workingman's condition so long as the existing order of society holds its ground. What labor gains on one side it for ever loses on the other, and as often as it rolls the Sisyphean rock-the rate of wages-up the hill, it rolls down again to crush and destroy the workman. All the old pictures of foiled effort, with which the Greeks peopled their Hades, become but pictures of the efforts of the working classes to raise their condition above the wretched standard called "natural wages."

Those who are striving to rouse the working classes to overthrow the frame-work of modern society and its economic basis, the right of property, are not slow to discern this. Thus the leader of the German socialists, Lasalle, based his fierce denunciations of modern civilization and its proprietary rights upon the recognised doctrines of the English school, claiming to be "equipped with all the knowledge of the age" on this subject. His chief opponent, his successful rival in the love and allegiance of the working classes of Germany, is Schulze-Delitzsch, who has devoted his life to showing the working classes that they