70 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



comparison with the increase of food supplied from its own 

 soil. 



A source of error which has helped to support the doctrine 

 here combatted exists in the assumption that the most produc- 

 tive lands are first occupied, and then those that are poorer, 

 and so on down to those whose cultivation will barely sustain 

 life. If this were so it would almost inevitably follow that 

 the increased labor necessary to secure a given amount of pro- 

 duct from the inferior soils would imply the truth of the doc- 

 trine. But it is evident that in the infancy of society when 

 the numbers are small and the facilities for cultivation few, 

 only the lands easily cultivated can be occupied, and there 

 must necessarily be the lighter and less productive soils. Up 

 to their time even in the oldest civilized communities, some 

 of the most productive lands have not yet been brought under 

 cultivation, while as in Great Britain, within the last twenty 

 years perhaps the most beautiful crops in the whole country 

 have been taken from lands which previously were considered 

 almost valueless. 



The statistics of the most advaneed nations do not at all 

 indicate this disparity between increase of population and 

 the means of subsistence. In the United States the increase 

 of population from 1850 to 1860 was 35.5 per cent., while the 

 wealth of the country, real and personal, excluding that in the 

 slaves, increased 86 per cent. ; or the capital wealth of the 

 country grew at the rate of 8? per cent., and the population at 

 that of a fraction over 3 percent, per annum ; the average share 

 of each individual in the whole wealth of the country, were it 

 equally divided, being in 1850, $266, and in 1860, $449 ; being 

 an increase in ten years of 69 per cent, to each person. The 

 siatistics of the last census present still more astonishing 

 results. The " true value " of the real and personal property 

 of this country in 1860 was in round numbers $16,000,000,000, 

 In this was included the value of slaves who in 1870 owned 

 themselves, and so were not reckoned as property. Aside 



