424 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL CHAP. 



the larger produce is much greater, labour of men and 

 horses being the most important item, of this great cost. 

 When prices of wheat and other arable crops are low, it 

 therefore pays both landlord and farmer to discharge their 

 labourers, sow grass, and keep cattle or sheep, which 

 require the minimum amount of labour per hundred acres. 

 We have already seen in the case of the Wellingborough 

 Allotment Association, that men working for themselves 

 can profitably put ten times as much labour on the land 

 as a tenant farmer usually employs ; and this last number 

 is again reduced to one-fifth when the land is turned into 

 grass. It follows that the two millions of acres recently 

 thrown out of cultivation in Great Britain would support 

 in comfort, at the lowest computation, more than a 

 hundred thousand families in excess of those who are now 

 employed there. 



The redudio ad absurdum of this method of con- 

 founding profit with produce was seen when, in reply to 

 the demand of the Highland crofters to be allowed to 

 occupy and cultivate the valleys formerly cultivated by 

 their ancestors, but from which these were expelled to 

 make room for deer, the late Duke of Argyll replied that 

 there was no unoccupied land available, since all the land 

 in Scotland was applied to its best " economic use." 

 By this he meant that the rental received by the land- 

 lords for their deer and grouse shootings was greater 

 than they could obtain from the Highland cultivators ! 

 The difference in produce of food might be a hundred to 

 one in favour of the Highlanders ; but that, in the duke's 

 opinion, had nothing to do with the matter. Political 

 economists, as a rule, never allude to this most important 

 point, of the essential difference between production and 

 profit. Mill just mentions it while showing that peasant 

 farms are the most productive ; but he does not reason the 

 thing out, and few other writers mention it at all. Hence 

 political writers, in the face of the clearest and most 

 abundant evidence, again and again deny that labourers 

 can possibly grow wheat and other crops at a profit, 

 because capitalist farmers cannot do so. But the peasant 

 gives that daily, minute, and loving attention to his small 



