farmer or planter, nor the wool-grower with him who has wool to sell; but they each and all find it advantageous to exchange the produce of their labor with the carpenter, the blacksmith, the mason, the miner, the furnace-man, the spinner, the weaver and the printer, as all these require to purchase food and the materials of clothing, and to pay for them with their services, or the commodities they have produced. Where the producer and consumer are placed side by side there is rapid motion of the products of labor, with increased power to repay to mother earth what she has lent, and to establish a credit with her for larger loans in future. Where, on the contrary, there are only farmers or planters, and where consequently there is but little societary motion, the powers of the earth diminish, and the producer and consumer become more widely separated, with heavy diminution of both heat and force. This is seen in all purely agricultural countries. Virginia and the Carolinas have been steadily engaged in exhausting the elements of fertility in the soil, because of the absence of consumers, and the necessity for dependence on distant markets; and such, to a great extent, is the case throughout our Southern States. The farmer who commences on rich prairie land, obtains at first forty or fifty bushels to the acre; but the quantity declines from year to year, and finally falls to twenty, or often even less. A century since, the farmers of New York were reported as obtaining generally twenty-four bushels of wheat per acre, but the average now is little more than twelve, while that of the rich State of Ohio has fallen yet lower. The power of the soil to yield food being the measure of the power of men to live together, with each stage of its decline the ability to associate diminishes; as is shown in the remarkable emigration now going on from Ohio, the settlement of which is yet so recent from Georgia, with a population of 1,000,000, and a territory capable of supporting half the people of the Union-and from Alabama, which but forty years ago was a wilderness occupied chiefly by a few straggling Indians. The consumer must take his place beside the producer in order to enable man to comply with the condition on which he obtains loans from the great bank of mother earth-the simple condition that when he shall have done with the capital furnished to him he shall return it to the place whence it had been taken.

Wherever this condition is complied with we see a steady increase in the motion of the matter destined to furnish man

with food, and an equally steady increase in the number of persons requiring to be supplied, with a constant improvement in the quantity and quality of the food to be divided among the claimants. In the days of the Plantagenets, when the population of England little exceeded 2,000,000, an acre yielded but six bushels of wheat, and famines were frequent. Now, we see 18,000,000 occupying the same surface, and obtaining greatly increased quantities of very superior food.

So, likewise, has it been in France. In 1760 the population was 21,000,000, and the produce of grain 94,500,000 hectolitres; whereas, in 1840, the former had risen to 34,000,000, and the latter to 182,516,000, giving to each and every person twenty per cent. more in quantity, with great improvement in the quality of the grain; and yet the surface cultivated had scarcely at all increased. Within this period the potato culture has been introduced, and green crops now furnish supplies of food two-thirds as great as the whole quantity produced less than a century since. The total product has trebled, while the numbers to be fed have increased but sixty per cent. A constantly growing diversity of employment now enables the French peasant to pay his debts to mother earth, returning to her the manure yielded by his crops; whereas, when manufactures scarcely existed, famines were so numerous and severe, as sometimes to sweep off a large proportion of the widely scattered population.

So, too, is it in Belgium, Germany, and every other country in which diversity of employment facilitates association ; while the reverse is seen in all those purely agricultural countries which are steadily exhausting their soil, and diminishing the power of association, as in Virginia and Carolina on one side of the ocean, Portugal and Turkey on the other.

In proportion as increased motion leads to increased power of association, man is enabled to call to his aid other forces to be employed in grinding his grain and transporting its product to market; in converting his trees into planks and preparing them for houses; and, finally, in carrying his messages with such rapidity that time and space seem almost annihilated. At each successive stage of progress in this direction, he finds himself enabled more and more to devote his time and mind to the production of the grain to be ground, the trees to be sawed, and the wool to be spun ; and thus to make provision for increased association with his

fellow-men, each step being but the preparation for a new and greater one.

§ 4. The law of the relative increase in the numbers of mankind, and in the supply of food and other commodities required for their support may now be found in the following propositions :

Motion gives force, and the more rapid the motion the greater is the force obtained.

With motion matter takes on itself new and higher forms, passing from the simple ones of the inorganic world and through those more complex of the vegetable world to the highly complicated forms of animal life, and ending in man.

The more rapid the motion the greater is the tendency to changes of form, to increase of force, and to increase of the power at the command of man.

The more simple the forms in which matter exists, the less is the power of resistance to gravitation, the greater the tendency to centralization, the less the motion, and the less the force.

The more complex the form the greater becomes the power of resistance to gravitation, the greater the tendency to decentralization, the greater the motion, and the greater the

force.

With every increase of power on the one hand there is diminished resistance on the other. The more motion produced the greater must, therefore, be the tendency to further increase of motion and of force.

The most complex and highly organized form in which matter exists is that of man; and here alone do we find the capacity for direction required for producing increase of motion and of force.

Wherever the greatest number of men exist we should therefore find the greatest tendency to the decentralization of matter, to increase of motion, to further changes of form, and to the higher development commencing in the vegetable world and ending in the increased production of men.

With every increase in the extent to which matter has assumed the form of man, there should, consequently, be an increase of his power to control and direct the forces provided for his use; with constantly accelerated motion, and constantly accelerated changes of form, and constant increase in his power to command the food and clothing needed for his support.

In the material world, motion among the atoms of matter is a consequence of physical heat. Greatest at the equator,

it diminishes until, as we approach the poles, we reach the region of centralization and physical death.

In the moral world it is a consequence of social heat; and motion, as has been aiready shown, consists in "an exchange of relations" resulting from the existence of those differences that develop social life. It is greatest in those communities in which agriculture, manufactures, and commerce are happily combined, and in which, consequently, society has the highest organization. It diminishes as we approach the declining despotisms of the East, the regions of centralization and social death. It increases as we pass from the purely agricultural States of the South towards the regions of more diversified industry in those of the North and East, and there, accordingly, do we find decentralization, life, and force.

Centralization, slavery, and death, travel hand in hand together in both the material and the moral world.

§ 5. The view here presented differs totally from that commonly received, and known as the Malthusian law of population, which may thus be given :

Population tends to increase in a geometrical ratio, while the supplies of food increase in an arithmetical one only. The former is, therefore, perpetually outstripping the latter, and hence arises the disease of over-population, with its accompaniments, poverty, wretchedness and death; a disease requiring for its remedy, wars, pestilences and famines on the one hand, or on the other, the exercise of that "moral restraint" which shall induce men and women to refrain from matrimony, and thus avoid the dangers resulting from addition to the numbers requiring to be fed. Reduced to distinct propositions, the theory is as follows:

1. Matter tends to take upon itself higher forms, passing from the simple ones of inorganic life to those more beautiful of the vegetable and animal life, and finally terminating

in man.

2. This tendency exists in a slight degree in the lower forms of life, matter tending to take on itself the forms of potatoes and turnips, herrings and oysters, in an arithmetical ratio only.

3. When, however, we reach the highest form of which matter is capable, we find the tendency to assume it existing in a geometrical ratio; as a consequence of which, while man

tends to increase as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, potatoes and turnips, herrings and oysters, increase only as 1, 2, 3, 4; causing the highest form perpetually to outstrip the lower, and producing the disease of over-population.

Were this asserted of any thing else than man, it would be deemed in the highest degree absurd; and it would be asked, why a general law should here be set aside. Everywhere else, increase in number is in the inverse ratio of development. Thousands of billions of coral insects are needed to build up islands for men and animals that count by thousands or by millions. Of the clio borealis, thousands furnish but one mouthful for the mighty whale. The progeny of a single pair of carp would in three years amount to thousands of billions; that of a pair of rabbits would in twenty years count by millions; whereas that of a pair of elephants would not number dozens. When, however, we reach the highest form, we hear of a new law, in virtue of which man increases in a geometrical ratio, while increase of the commodities required for his use is limited to the arithmetical one.

Endowed with faculties that can be developed solely by association with his kind, made in the image of his Creator, and gifted with the power to distinguish right from wrong, man is thus required to choose between starvation on the one hand, or, on the other, abstinence from that association which tends, in accordance with the divine command, to promote - increase of numbers. Such is the generally received doctrine of modern political economy, and, strange as it appears, no proposition has ever yet exercised more influence on the fortunes of the human race. That it should so have done has partly resulted from the fact that it has been propped up by another, in virtue of which man is supposed to have commenced the work of cultivation on the rich soils which would give large returns to his labors, and to have been compelled, with the growth of population, to resort to poorer ones, with constant decline in the reward of his toil,-a theory that, if true, would establish the correctness of the Malthusian law of population. What are its claims to being received as true, will now be shown.