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In this particular instance, the distribution of the chemical elements of the human frame-phosphorus especially-seems to be closely connected with the question. But we may well hold with Mr. Greg "that other physiological causes of antifecund tendency are yet to be discovered; and that races, nations and families would not so often die out were it not so."

§ 71. By another compensatory law of nature, the less the rate of the reproduction of any form of life, the greater the prolongation of the life of the individual specimen. What nature produces with difficulty, she guards with care.

This law also holds good between different classes of men. Steadily for centuries past there have been added days, months, years to the average length of human life,-partly from occult natural causes, partly from the growth of medical science and the adoption of wiser sanitary and hygienic methods. Thus, as Macaulay notes, the death-rate in London in any ordinary year of the seventeenth century was greater than in a bad cholera year of the nineteenth; and the poorest woman in our times can command better medical attendance than the queens of that era could have obtained. The death-rate fell between 1655 and 1845 from one in twenty-three to one in forty. French and German statistics show that the wealthy and educated classes live at least a third longer than the poor and uncultured classes.

So again it is a mark of the great advance of Christendom, as compared with other groups of nations, that the great epidemics no longer originate within its borders. And since Christian governments have taken measures to put under sanitary regulations, the vast Mohammedan and Pagan pilgrimages and festivals, which still breed pestilences, it is to be hoped that they will cease.

§ 72. Supposing that a bad social economy should check a people or a large mass of it in its natural growth in civilization and intelligence, what would be the effect on their numbers? That would depend upon the vitality and elasticity of the stock to which the people belonged.

(1) In some cases, as in the provinces under Mohammedan rule, oppression seems to produce a depression of spirits or of

nervous energy, and thereby to exercise a singularly sterilizing influence. The population of a besieged city is notably sterile.

(2) More ordinarily, however, the removal of the true preventive checks, the growth of intellect and the access of comfort, tends to cause a rapid and abnormal increase of numbers. The starved man, like the starved plant, propagates freely. Reduce the people to the level of the beasts and they will multiply like the beasts. And so their numbers may become really excessive, and the mass of a community sink ever deeper in poverty and misery. Such a result may be expected when the wealth of a nation tends to concentrate in the hands of a few, instead of being disseminated throughout the whole people in something like equality. Overpopulation in such a case is not the consequence of natural laws, but of man's wilful interference with them.

§ 73. Man's history as a producer of food may be described as ordinarily passing through three stages. In the first he is a hunter depending upon the voluntary, and therefore the scantiest, productions of the earth that were fitted for his use. In the second he is a shepherd, who has mastered the services of that division of nature which meets his wants with most directness and least labor; but he is compelled to migrate with his tribe when they seek new pastures, and he has no rights and no safety save as a member of it. In the third he is a tiller of the soil, a member of a body politic, possessed of a fixed home. He makes an acre produce as much food as hundreds did in the first stage, or tens in the second. He is able to act in greater independence of other men; able also to associate more closely with them. The societary circulation moves more rapidly and consequently more forcefully. The resistance of nature diminishing, the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence, which was very great in the first stage, and great still in the second, in large measure disappears. It was very pressure that overcame the natural inertia of man and forced him to press forward. "For his sake" the earth was accursed to be the home of briers, thorns and thistles, that difficulties might develop his power as the earth's appointed master.

that

§ 74. Man's "power over nature" continues to grow with every advance in the compactness of society. Men obtain the use of more iron and coal, houses and ships, wool and cotton, in return for less labor, as society advances. When the density of population made it worth while to carry the water in pipes through the streets of our city, it was obtained with far less outlay of labor thau when every man carried his bucket to the river's bank, or even to the pump, whose erection also marked a stage in social development. So when through the growth of population it becomes "worth while" to sink a shaft to the coalbed, it is no longer necessary to waste wood as fuel and spend labor in chopping it, and the time saved can be spent in turning the trees into lumber or some other profitable work. Till the grist-mill is erected the labor of a thousand arms is expended in grinding grain; the work then becomes the business of a few persons, and the rest have the more time for better work than turning hand-mills or pounding the wheat in querns. And these are but specimen facts that represent the whole movement of society.

"From the beginning," says Herbert Spencer," the pressure of population has been the proximate cause of progress. It produced the original diffusion of the race. It compelled men to abandon predatory habits and take to agriculture. It led to the clearing of the earth's surface. It forced men into the social state; made social organization inevitable; and has developed the social sentiments. It has stimulated to progressive improvements in production, and to increased skill and intelligence. It is daily thrusting us into closer contact and more mutually dependent relationships. After having caused, as it ultimately must, the due peopling of the globe, and the raising of all its habitable parts into the highest state of culture; after having brought all processes for the satisfaction of human wants to perfection; after having at the same time developed the intellect into complete competency for its work and the feelings into complete fitness for social life, the pressure of population must gradually bring itself to an end."

CHAPTER FIFTH.

THE NATIONAL ECONOMY OF LAND.

§ 75. WE have defined a nation as a people occupying a continuous area, and owning this in a more eminent sense than any part of it is owned by any of its citizens. Its stewardship of the economic interests of its people extends to the general oversight of their rural economy, and calls for the careful removal of all obstacles-especially those of a legal kind-to its improvement and that of the people engaged in it; and also for the adoption of such measures of improvement as are not easily attainable by individual action. It may justly be said that this is true of the duty of the state towards any form of industry; but from the peculiar relation of agriculture to the very existence of the nation, the state stands in a relation of far greater responsibility here. Many of those who most incline to exclude the state from all activity in the sphere of industrial interests, are quite ready to admit that where motives of public policy call for interference, the landowner may fairly be treated as the trustee or steward of the national property, not in any absolute sense the owner.

§ 76. What was said in the preceding chapter of the general advance of industrial methods through the growth of numbers and of the resulting power of coöperation, is eminently true of agriculture. As time advances, larger crops are reaped at a less cost upon lands that were early occupied, and those that were previously inaccessible to tillage, are cleared or drained. A larger amount of labor and capital becomes available, and can be expended with perfect safety upon the same field, as the crops are increased in still greater ratio. Especially the division of labor contributes to this. The early agriculturist was "Jack of all trades and master of none." His house, his clothing, his rude tools, everything that he had, was his own workmanship. But when these are produced for him by skilled artisans, who set

EXTENSIVE TILLAGE.-MEDIEVAL ENGLAND.

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him at leisure to do his farm-work better, he obtains all these things at a less outlay of labor, and of much improved quality.

§ 77. Early agriculture was extensive in its method; that is, it expended a small capital upon a large surface. Just as the hunter required a larger area than the shepherd, and the shepherd more than the farmer, so the bad and imperfect agriculture of a poor half-savage age, required a larger area than when methods of tillage are highly improved and the capital at the command of the farmer has increased. Thus we find half-barbarous peoples in earlier times driven by famine from lands that now sustain a dense population.

English agriculture in the middle ages is a case in point. As much of the land as is now under wheat was taken up in raising as much food as would now suffice for a million and a half of persons. The population was something between that number and two and a half millions; yet nearly the whole people were employed in producing food; even the townsmen poured out into the country to help to gather in the harvest, and the Long Vacation at the Universities was established that their thirty thousand students might go home to assist. As much seed was sown to the acre as at present, but the average yield was only above one-fourth what it is now. Yet the climate of England, as of all Northern Europe, was warmer than it now is. Grapes grew plentifully in the open air, and wine was made that compared with those of France. "The land was imperfectly drained; the working of the soil was shallow; the manures employed were limited" to such as were ready at hand, at a time when the Flemish farmers imported English marl. "Scanty as the crop was, it seems to have been very exhausting, for half the land, in ordinary cases, lay fallow. . . Such crops as were obtained, were not procured without large relative expenditure." The agricultural implements were of the poorest; the plough was a ponderous structure of wood and iron, that it took four horses to drag over, rather than through, the soil. Metal was so scarce, being mostly imported from Normandy, that the wear and tear of plough-iron in a dry season was a large item in the farm budget.