'68 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



capable with no more than ten times the labor now bestowed 

 upon it. 



But there is another condition of productiveness left out 

 of sight by Mr. Mill. Purely agricultural communities the 

 world over are almost certain to exhibit not only a diminish- 

 ing ratio between the agricultural product and the labor be- 

 stowed, but an actual diminution of products of the soil. In 

 our own country, on lands formerly yielding thirty bushels of 

 wheat to the acre, the returns at present are less than that, as 

 in Western New York and Ohio. In our own State of Wis- 

 consin the same deterioration is observable. The reason of 

 this is that the wealth of the soil is exhausted by the exporta- 

 tion of raw products, and however true it may be theoretically 

 that the fertility of the soil may be kept up by proper appli- 

 ances, these appliances are almost certain never to be made. 

 It is oidy where there is considerable proportion of the popula- 

 tion engaged in other occupations besides that of agriculture 

 that the soil is kept up to its original productive power or can 

 duplicate and reduplicate that indefinitely. 



In Massachusetts there are hundreds of farms which now 

 produce several times their former capability, and, so far as 

 we can judge, with far less than the proportional outlay of labor. 

 The same is more conspicuously the case in England and 

 France and Belgium, in the communities where, by reason of 

 the vast diversity of employments, a large proportion of what 

 is taken from the soil is returned almost immediately to it. 

 It is not perfectly clear whether those who talk of the pres- 

 sure of population on sustenance mean by the latter only 

 food, or whether they mean to embrace, also, clothing, shelter 

 and some other materials of human well-being. If the latter, 

 then it is evident that the increase of sustenance in very many 

 of the most populous communities of the world greatly out- 

 strips that of population, even after a considerable advance in 

 the art of agriculture. It is certain, moreover, that, up to the 

 present time, in no country where a wise industrial and eco- 



