labor as cheap corn, because cheap iron makes cheap tools for agriculture and cheap machinery for clothing. But a foreign trade, which neither directly nor by any indirect consequence increases the cheapness of anything connsumed by the laborers, does not, any more than an invention or discovery in the like case, tend to raise profits or retard their fall; it merely substitutes the production of goods for foreign markets in the room of the home production of luxuries, leaving the employment for capital neither greater nor less than before. It must, of course, be supposed that, with the increase of capital, population also increases; for, if it did not, the consequent rise of wages would bring down profits, in spite of any cheapness of food. Suppose, then, that the population of Great Britain goes on increasing at its present rate, and demands every year a supply of imported food considerably beyond that of the year preceding. This annual increase in the food demanded from the exporting countries can only be obtained either by great improvements in their agriculture, or by the application of a great additional capital to the growth of food. The former is likely to be a very slow process, from the rudeness and ignorance of the agricultural classes in the food-exporting countries of Europe, while the British colonies and the United States are already in possession of most of the improvements yet made, so far as suitable to their circumstances. There remains, as a resource, the extension of culti vation. And on this it is to be remarked that the capital by which any such extension can take place is mostly still to be created. In Poland, Russia, Hungary, Spain, the increase of capital is extremely slow. In America it is rapid, but not more rapid than the population. The principal fund at present available for supplying this country with a yearly increasing importation of food is that portion of the annual savings of America which has heretofore been applied to increasing the manufacturing establishments of the United States, and which free trade in corn may possibly divert from that purpose to growing food for our market. This limited source of supply, unless great improvements take place in agriculture, can not be expected to keep pace with the growing demand of so rapidly increasing a population as that of Great Britain ; and, if our population and capital continue to increase with their present rapidity, the only mode in which food can continue to be supplied cheaply to the one is by sending the other abroad to produce it. Not even Americans have any adequate knowledge of the productive capacity of the United States. The grain-fields are not yet all occupied; and we can easily produce the total cotton consumption of the world on that quantity of land in Texas alone by which the whole cultivable area of that State exceeds the corresponding area of the empire of Austria-Hungary (see Chart No. XVIII, which shows the remarkable proCHART XVII. portion of land possessed by the United States as compared with European countries); and the exports of agricultural food from the United States are now six times what they were in 1850, about the time when Mr. Mill made the above statements. Immense areas of our soil have not yet been broken by the plow, and the quantities of cereals grown in the United States seem to be steadily increasing. In fact, the greatest grain-crop yet grown in this country was that of 1882. The comparison of the crops of late years with those just succeeding the war (as seen in Chart No. XVII) shows a very suggestive increase; since it indicates where employment has been given to vast numbers of laborers, and where investment has been found for our rapidly growing capital.' § 7. This brings us to the last of the counter-forces which check the downward tendency of profits in a country whose capital increases faster than that of its neighbors, and whose profits are therefore nearer to the minimum. This is, the perpetual overflow of capital into colonies or foreign countries, to seek higher profits than can be obtained at home. I believe this to have been for many years one of the principal causes by which the decline of profits in England has been arrested. It has a twofold operation: In the first place, it does what a fire, or an inundation, or a commercial crisis would have done-it carries off a part of the increase of capital from which the reduction of profits proceeds; secondly, the capital so carried off is not lost, but is chiefly employed either in founding colonies, which become large exporters of cheap agricultural produce, or in extending and perhaps improving the agriculture of older communities. In countries which are further advanced in industry and population, and have therefore a lower rate of profit, than others, there is always, long before the actual minimum is reached, a practical minimum, viz., when profits have fallen so much below what they are elsewhere that, were they to fall lower, all further accumulations would go abroad. As long as there are old countries where capital increases very rapidly, and new countries where profit is still high, profits in the old countries will not sink to the rate which would put a stop to accumulation: the fall is stopped at the point which sends capital abroad. 1 A comparison of Chart No. XVII with Chart No. VI will furnish some means of learning whether the building of railways has gone on faster than is warranted by the increase of our crops (see supra, pp. 138, 139). |