HENRY CHARLES CAREY. 419 



most unfavorable to Bastiat's literary integrity is his own unsatisfac- 

 tory letter of explanation. 



The chief importance of this theory of value, whether in its orig- 

 inal form or as revised by Bastiat, will be found to consist, we believe, 

 in its alleged universality. It would hardly have been thought an 

 epoch-making contribution, had it not offered a basis on which to rest 

 the value of land and labor as well as of goods. But this claim to 

 universal applicability, it may be safely predicted, will never be made 

 good. The differing values of land, according to situation and qual- 

 ity, and the changes of value resulting from the good or bad effects 

 of improved communication or newly-discovered resources, present a 

 range of insoluble contradictions, on which forty years of effort have 

 made no impression. As a theory of partial application, Mr. Carey's 

 statement offers acknowledged attractions, but it lends itself with diffi- 

 culty to any precise and thorough analysis of the phenomena of ex- 

 change, — a branch of inquiry in which both he and Bastiat are 

 singularly deficient. 



Ten years later, Mr. Carey tells us, he discovered a law of produc- 

 tion from land the exact reverse of Ricardo's, and presented it in his 

 " Past, Present, and Future," published in 1848. The new theory, 

 which is well adjusted to that of value already announced, declares 

 that in the progress of society men begin with the cultivation of light 

 and easily-worked soils, and as they accumulate capital and increase 

 in numbers take up the richer but less manageable lands, so that with 

 the advance of the community there is a progressive gain in the rate of 

 return from the land and an increasing cost of subsistence. Although 

 this statement of the historical course of settlement of new countries 

 was announced and subsequently relied upon as a formal refutation of 

 Ricardo's system, a follower of Ricardo might accept it without diffi- 

 culty, and yet find the essentials of the Ricardian doctrine untouched. 

 The real question does not relate to the order of occupation of the 

 soil, but to the causes which at a given time make one piece of land 

 more valuable than another, and the relation of these causes to dis- 

 tribution in a given state of the arts of production. But although 

 Mr. Carey's historical discovery — the validity of which he supported 

 by facts collected in a remarkably wide range of reading — had not 

 the logical results which he claimed for it, it brings to view one of the 

 most interesting questions connected with the evolution of human 

 society. It is to be said, moreover, that the order of development 

 which he denies had been treated as the true historical order by many 

 economists, and that in this as in numbers of other cases his vigorous 

 attack compelled the revision of some too hasty generalizations. 



