gress of the Nation, states that, "the number of yards of cotton cloth exported in 1834 were greater by 125 per cent than in 1820, while the incre: se in the declared value is no more than 7 per cent. The average price per yard, which in 1820 was 123d., had fallen in 1834 to 6 d. The quantity of twist exported increased in the same period in the proportion of 10 to 3, while the increase in its declared value was only in the proportion of 13 to 7. The average price of twist in 1820 was 2s. 51d. per pound; in 1834 it was 1s. 43d. The diminution of value in the twist appears to amount to 45 per cent, and in cloth to 514 per cent." Progress of the Nation, vol. 1, page 209. The money price of labor remaining the same, its command over cotton cloth, or wages estimated in cotton, had more than doubled. If we compare the official and declared valued of all the British and Irish products and manufactures exported from Great Britain in the years instanced by Mr. Porter, and the proportion per cent that the declared or real value bore to the official values, we shall be able to see in what degree the effectiveness of labor had increased in the production of all those commodities which Great Britain exports.

This exhibits an average reduction in cost upon all the articles of export of forty per cent. We extend the comparison to the present period, taking the average of the last five years for the purpose of excluding temporary variations in the market, as follows:

The rates at which all articles of export and import are officially valued, having been fixed long before the earliest period in the above tables, and remaining unchanged, the first column is only valuable as a means of determining the quantity of the exports. The proportions between quantity and cost, as the latter is shown by the declared value, at different periods, of course exhibit the relative efficiency of labor acting in combination with the capital employed by it in the work of production. Whatever may be the respective share of labor and capital in the progress they achieve, it is plain that the reduction in the cost of commodities is equivalent to an advance in the rate of wages. If, as shown by the above tables, $41 63 would purchase during the last five years as much of all the articles for the supply of human wants and comforts, which make up the multiform exportation of Great Britain, as $94 would have done thirty years ago, it is evidence the real wages, that is, the amount of supplies at the command of the laborer, have more than doubled, provided wages estimated in money have not receded. It shows also that wages absorb more than twice as large a proportion of the product resulting from the joint action of labor and capital as before, and that consequently the proportion going to profits has diminished. But the captialist takes his diminished proportion from an increased total production. To the owner of a mill it is a matter of indifference whether he receives in return for the use of his buildings, machinery, &c., sixty-six per cent

of one million yards of cloth, or thirty-three per cent of two millions. R. S., and those who think with him, will not admit the supposition that the total product is not increased by at least a sufficient per centage to pay the increased proportion going to labor without impairing the remainder belonging to profits. To establish this would be to prove that in the progress of society labor is devouring capital. They maintain the reverse. According to their theory capital is more and more obtaining the mastery, and labor becoming more and more its slave. Their system is one of antagonism and discord. They have failed to see that the interests of the laborer, the capitalist, and the consumer, who pays both by the purchase of their products, are in perfect harmony; and such is the teaching of their great master. "With permanently high price of corn," says Mr. Ricardo, and McCulloch quotes the passage to assent and approve," caused by increased labor on the land, wages would be high, and as commodities would not rise on account of the rise of wages, profits would necessarily fall. If goods worth £1,000 require at one time labor which cost £800, and at another time the price of the same quantity of labor is raised to £900, profits will fall from £200 to £100. Profits would not fall in one trade only, but in all. High wages equally affect the profits of the farmer, the manufacturer and the merchant. There is no other way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down." (On Protection to Agriculture, page 43.)

If the theory of R. S. is correct-if capital has been gaining power at the expense of labor, and that in virtue of a permanent law which must continue to operate in the future as in the past, then it is clear that a duplication of real wages must have been and must ever be accompanied by more than a duplication of profits. If it were not, profits would recede relatively to wages, and our case would be made out. If it were, then the increase of wages, and the still greater increase of profits, must be attended by a diminution of the share of the products going to rent, which is equally fatal to the Malthusian hypothesis. The conclusion is to be avoided only by supposing the increase of production sufficiently large to cover a duplication and more than a duplication of rent, after satisfying the double demand of labor, and the more than double demand of capital. All this, too, be it remembered, with a reduction in the cost of commodities to the consumer of more than fifty per cent.

I have referred to rent only, because I am not aware what are the views entertained by R. S. in reference to its entering into the price of commodities. I quoted in a previous article, two passages from the same work of Malthus, for the purpose of showing his admissions that the wages of labor must increase in proportion to rent, and that rent has in fact in England diminished in the proportion which it bears to the whole value of the produce, at the same time that, "though the landlord has a less share of the produce, yet this less share, from the very great increase of the produce, yields a larger quantity." We shall have occasion to use this statement, which Mr. Malthus made upon the authority of the returns collected by the Board of Agriculture, for another purpose; at present it is cited only as evidence that in his belief wages must obtain an increasing and not a diminishing pro. portion of the products of the soil.

It may be worth while here to cite a passage in which McCulloch gives the theory of his school in relation to the effect of rent and wages, in determining price.

"It is utterly impossible to go on increasing the price of that raw produce,

VOL. XXVI.NO. I.

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which forms the principal part of the subsistence of the laborer, by taking inferior soils into cultivation without also increasing his wages. A rise in wages is seldom or never exactly coincident with a rise in the price of necessaries, but they can never be very far separated. The price of the necessaries of life is in fact the cost of producing labor. The laborer cannot work if he is not supplied with the means of subsistence. And although a period of varying extent, according to the circumstances of the country at the time, must always elapse, when necessaries are rising in price before wages can be proportionably augmented, there can be no question but that in the end such an augmentation will be brought about. Now as rent is nothing but the excess, or the value of the excess, of the produce obtained from the best above that obtained from the very worst soils in cultivation, it is plain it does not enter into the cost of production, and can have no influence whatever on prices. Still better to elucidate this fundamental principle, let us that an individual has two loaves on his table; one raised on very suppose fertile land, the other on the very worst land in cultivation: in the latter and prowages there will be no rent, and it will be wholly divided between fits. We have already shown that it is the cost of producing this loaf which will regulate the price of all other loaves; and although it will be true that the rent which the loaf raised on the best land will afford, will be equal to all the difference between the expense of growing the corn of which it is made, and the corn raised on the worst land of which the standard loaf is made, yet it is only in consequence of this difference that any rent whatever is paid. Twenty different loaves, all selling for the same price may yield different portions of rent; but it is one only, that which yields no rent, which regulates the value of the rent, and which is to be considered as the standard. It is demonstrable, therefore, that rent does not enter into pricewages and profits make up the whole value of every commodity. And, therefore, when wages rise profits must fall; and when wages fall profits must rise. But we have shown that there is never any falling off, but a constant increase in the productiveness of the labor employed in manufacturing and preparing raw produce. And such being the case, it is demonstrably certain that the subsistence of the laborer could never be increased in price, and consequently that no additions could ever be made to his necessary wages, were it not for the diminished power of agricultural labor, originating in the inevitable necessity under which we are placed of resorting to poorer soils to obtain raw produce as society advances. The continually decreasing fertility of the soil is, therefore, at bottom the great and permanent cause of a fall of profits. Profits would never fall if wages were not increased; and, supposing taxation to continue invariable, wages would never be increased were it not for the decreasing fertility of the soil, and the consequent increase of the labor necessary to obtain corn and other raw products."

It would be very difficult to find a passage which more thoroughly exposes the difference between the British system of political economy and the American, than the preceding. It teaches that wages rise because labor becomes more inefficient-that more is given because less is received-that capital pays a larger dividend to labor because the fund from which it has to pay it is diminished. Our system, on the contrary, teaches that labor is more highly paid, both as to proportion and as to absolute amount, when it contributes, and where it contributes, and because it contributes, most to swell the gross quantity of the products out of which, or from the value of which, wages must be derived-when and where, and because it is most

productive. It is not allowed to monopolize all the gain resulting from its superior efficiency, though it obtains the larger share. Part is retained by the capital, through the increased aid of which it was enabled to effect enlarged and improved results; part goes to the consumer by the fall of price. It would seem not hard to determine which is most consonant with reason and facts; nor would it seem presumptuous to say, that the British theory is crammed with absurdities. It may be objected to the argument founded upon the diminished proportion which the declared or real value of exports from Great Britain bears to their official value or quantity, that it is limited to manufactured commodities, and that the advance in real wages resulting from the diminution in their cost may be counteracted by the rise in the price of agricultural products. The statistics which we cited in the November number of this Magazine from the Annuaire de L'Economie Politique, of the agricultural production of France for a period of one hundred and fifty years, and of its distribution, showing as they do a vast increase both in the nominal or money wages, the real wages, or the absolute quantity of grain they would command, and the proportion which they bore to the entire crop, might suffice for an answer. If a further one were required for the purpose of showing that the experience of England agreed with that of France, it might be found in the statement of Mr. Malthus before referred to. It was, that "the average proportion which rent bears to the value of the produce seems not to exceed one-fifth, whereas formerly when there was less capital employed and less value produced, the proportion amounted to one-fourth, one-third, or even two-fifths." In the same paragraph he says that "though the landlord has a less share of the whole produce, yet this less share, from the very great increase of the produce, yields a larger quantity." Of course the whole produce in the period to which he refers, must have more than doubled, in order that one-fifth now, should be greater than two-fifths formerly. If its amount at the earlier period be represented by 100, two-fifths of which, or 40, was retained for rent, it left 60 to be divided between wages and profits. It has now become 200 plus an indefinite quantity, which we may represent by x one-fifth, or 40+ goes to rent, and the remainder160+, is left for wages and profits-that is to say, two and two-thirds times as much as before, besides the indefinite addition 3x.

Thus much for the degree in which the agricultural laborers shared in the produce of their own toil. But what we want to learn is, the cost of that produce to others. If the increased quantity has been raised by the same or a less amount of labor, then it is obvious that its real cost has decreased. Upon this point there is no room for doubt. The number of agricultural laborers in Great Britain has been constantly decreasing in the proportion which it bore to the whole population and to the crop. Thus Mr. Porter informs us-(Progress of the Nation, vol. 1, page 148)-that "the total number of families in Great Britain has increased, between 1811 and 1831, from 2,544,215 to 3,414,175, or at the rate of thirty-four per cent; the number of families employed in agriculture has increased only from 896,998 to 961,134, or at the rate of 7 per cent." It was shown by the census of 1841 that the number of persons employed in agricultural labor was less absolutely and of course still less proportionally, than in 1831. We are not yet furnished with the information upon this point obtained by the census of 1851, but there can be no doubt that the same decrease in the proportion of agricultural laborers has continued down to the present period. This fact is

conclusive as to the diminution of the labor cost of agricultural products. It further testimony is wanted, it is furnished in that unexceptionable freetrade authority, the Edinburgh Review, for July,

"During the ten years of the present century, between 1811 and 1820, the wheat grown on our own soil sufficed for feeding 13,035,039 persons, allowing the yearly consumption of each to be eight bushels. The average price of wheat during those ten years was 888. 8d. per quarter, and the mean number of the population of Great Britain was 13,494,317. During the next space of ten years the mean number of mouths having increased to 15,465,474 we fed from our own soil 1,894,843 more than in the previous ten years. Yet what had been the average price for the whole period? It had fallen to 588. 5d., or to 218. 7d. per quarter below that at which it had, in 1815, been declared possible to keep our land in cultivation and which it was sought to maintain as a minimum by excluding all foreign imports, when the price should fall below 80s. per quarter. In the following decennium, with prices still further depressed to the average of 56s. 9d., our farmers provided wheat for 1,697,706 of the mouths which in the same period had been added to our numbers, or, for 16,628,188 of the 17,535,826 souls then inhabiting Great Britain."

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Mr. Porter, after giving the imports of wheat for a long series of years, to show "in how small a degree this country has hitherto been dependent upon foreigners in ordinary seasons for a due supply of our staple article of food," and how exceedingly great the increase of agricultural production must have been to have thus effectively kept in a state of independence a population which has advanced with so great a degree of rapidity," says, "the one article of wheat has been selected because it is that which is most generally consumed in England; but the position advanced would be found to hold good were we to go through the whole list of the consumable products of the earth."

It would be easy to bring any quantity of testimony upon the point under consideration, for the free-traders of England are laboriously engaged in proving that the farmers of the kingdom can produce food at much lower prices than any named in our quotations, (for we have stopped short of the epoch of the repeal of the corn laws,) and yet maintain a fair rate of profit.

It may be noticed that Mr. Malthus, in the quotation we have given, does not state the dates within which the proportion of rent to the whole produce has thus decreased, while its absolute amount has augmented. Mr. Porter, however, informs us that "the revenue drawn in the form of rent from the ownership of the soil has been at least doubled in every part of England since 1790, and it is more than probable that it has advanced 150 per cent throughout the kingdom."

R. S. states that "in 1830 and 1831 it was proved before a committee of the House of Lords, that rents had risen in England four hundred per cent within the period of half a century." Whatever the advance of rents be taken to be within this period, it has been shown, by the testimony of the most distinguished followers of Ricardo, that the production of food advanced yet more rapidly. Between 1804, the earliest period, we have any very reliable statistics on the subject, and 1841, the population of the United Kingdom advanced from 15,441,000 to 26,831,105, or 58 per cent. If we suppose the same rate of progress to have existed in the ten years preceding 1801 as since, the increase of the population between 1790 and 1841 will amount