CONCLUSION. Zeek 
which will work for us without payment, the re- 
mainder claiming wages in the form of a commission 
upon the produce which they save for us. 
Such robberies, in fact, as I have before pointed 
out, must be looked upon as inevitable from one 
quarter or another, a condition of human existence 
no more to be overcome than the necessity for 
breathing or eating. If we kill off the birds, our 
crops are ravaged by insects. If we allow them to 
live, they exact a certain amount of payment in return 
for their assistance. And, as the payment in question 
is undoubtedly very far smaller than the alternative 
loss, it is to our own interest to protect the birds 
rather than to sweep them away, and at the same 
time to incur an immense and otherwise needless 
expenditure in destroying the very creatures which 
they would have kept down, had we but permitted 
them to do so. 
In some way or other the many injurious insects 
must be kept down: that is one of the first axioms 
in the art of agriculture. We can perform the task 
ourselves, although only in an indifferent manner, 
and at the expense of a vast amount of time and 
labour; and time and labour, as every one knows, are 
equivalent to money. Nature is willing to carry out 
the same work far more perfectly, at the hands of 
her agents, for a certain remuneration—a small share 
of the profits, a mere commission upon the results. 
And we should look upon the arrangement thus 
offered to us as a business transaction, pressing a 
little hardly upon us at one time, perhaps, but re- 
