1 86 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



or in conveying it to the place where it is to be consumed; not to 

 suy. in addition, that the labor of cultivation itself is diminished by 

 whatever lessens the cost of bringing manure from a distance, or 

 facilitates the many operations of transport from place to place which 

 occur within the bounds of the farm. Railways and canals are vir- 

 tually a diminution of the cost of production of all things sent to 

 market by them; and literally so of all those things the appliances 

 and aids for producing which they serve to transmit. By their means 

 land can be cultivated which would not otherwise have remunerated 

 the cultivators without a rise of price. 



From similar considerations, it appears that many purely mechani- 

 cal improvements, which have, apparently at least, no peculiar con- 

 nection with agriculture, nevertheless enable a given amount of food 

 to be obtained with a smaller expenditure of labor. A great improve- 

 ment in the process of melting iron would tend to cheapen agricultural 

 implements, dimmish the cost of railroads, of wagons and carts, ships, 

 and perhaps buildings; and would hence diminish the cost of food. 

 The same effect would follow from better application of wind or water 

 power, engineering inventions useful in drainage, etc. 



Likewise, improvements in government, and almost every kind of 

 moral and social advancement, operate in the same manner to counter- 

 act the law of diminishing return to agricultural labor. Suppose a 

 country in the condition of France before the Revolution; the removal 

 of a fiscal burden on agriculture, such as tithe, has the same effect 

 as if the labor necessary for obtaining the existing produce were sud- 

 denly reduced one-tenth. The abolition of corn laws, or of any other 

 restrictions which prevent commodities from being produced where 

 the cost of their production is lowest, amounts to a vast improvement 

 in production. It is well known what has been the effect in England 

 of badly administered poor laws, and the still worse effect in Ireland 

 of a bad system of tenancy, in rendering agricultural labor slack and 

 ineffective. No improvements operate more directly upon the pro- 

 ductiveness of labor than those in the tenure of farms and in the laws 

 relating to landed property. Above all, the acquisition of a perma- 

 nent interest in the soil by the cultivators of it is as real and great 

 an improvement in production as the invention of the spinning jenny 

 or the steam engine. 



We may say the same of improvements in education. The iritelli- 

 of the workman is a most important element in the productive- 

 ness of labor. To look no farther than the most obvious phenomena, 



