The Land and the Community. 139 



fleet and army, was prevented. It was just these exceptions in 

 either case which induced the author to apply the scriptural 

 precept to secular circumstances, and contest not so much the 

 possibility as the probability of any man being situated amidst 

 circumstances wliere he could live and die entirely to himself. 



Young therefore adopts the favourite physiocratic theory ; 

 viz., that the employment of the greatest possible amount of 

 labour in agriculture ought to be the chief aim of the public 

 benefactor. It follows, of course, from such reasoning that 

 agriculture should be made capable of maintaining the greatest 

 possible amount of people. Now lands devoted to the cultiva- 

 tion of the vine, lucerne,^ etc., employed double and treble the 

 quantity of country people to those cultivated with corn, but 

 did not afford the same amount of direct human food. Was, 

 then, that class of farming preferable which produced the 

 greatest amount of human food, even though it employed a 

 smaller proportion of labour ? 



It seems so clear to modern thinkers that the last economy 

 is preferable in every way, that we wonder how there could 

 ever have been any doubt on the subject. But we must bear 

 in mind that, at the period under discussion — firstly, there 

 were supposed to be 15,000,000 acres of improvable waste; 

 secondly, that, even under the old husbandry, farmers were 

 producing sufficient to support themselves, their labourers, 

 and the manufacturers ; and thirdly, that a school of thought 

 was in the ascendency which believed that the employment 

 of what was then a limited labour population in anything but 

 agriculture was a misappropriation of scarce material. Can 

 we then wonder if some economists imagined that any increase 

 in the labour stock implied an increase in the national wealth ? 

 It was long after, that Ricardo had demonstrated that it is not 

 the gross produce of the land and labour that is important for 

 the society as a whole, but the net national income ; i.e., that 

 if the excess of the produce over the cost of production re- 

 mained constant, it was of no public importance whether the 



' Young's knowledge of farming was not perfect, as we shall have 

 more than one occasion to point out ; lucerne, nowadays at any rate, 

 requires very little cultivation. 



