6 NOTES ON THE NATURAL LIMITS TO OCCUPATION, ETC. 



whatever can legislation increase tlie number of afrricultural 

 Lauds without loss and injury to the people as a whole. 



In conclusion, let me not be supposed to indicate by these 

 observations that the lessening numbers of persons employed 

 on the land in such a country as the United Kingdom is to 

 be regarded as a matter to be deplored. On the contrary, I 

 regard it as an index of advance in civilisation. If the 

 food and raw products necessary for man's needs and satis- 

 factions could be miraculously produced without the agency 

 of a single labourer, mankind would be enriched, not im- 

 poverished ; for there would then be so much more labour 

 force available for the creation of comforts and satisfactions, 

 in such cheapness and abundance, that all men might 

 possess and enjoy them in a degree now only possible to a few 

 rich individuals. What is wanted, therefore, in countries 

 passing through a transition of the kind referred to is, not ta 

 place any check upon free migration and other movements 

 which now act as safety-valves to congested fields of labour, 

 but rather to increase the facilities for transfer from those 

 places and those occupations where pressure of competition 

 for employment is greatest. It is the obstruction which 

 natural and artificial barriers offer to transfer from blocked 

 areas and blocked occupations that causes the so-called con- 

 gestion of labour in crowded centres of population, and any 

 discovery which would remove such barriers would mark a 

 new era in the progress of civilised communities. 



DISCUSSION. 



Hon. N. J. BROWN, in speaking to the paper, said he could 

 not presume to criticise the able and interesting paper they 

 had just listened to. He would like to read it carefully 

 before making any remark upon it, but as he had been 

 invited to open a discussion of it, he would venture to express 

 one or two ideas that had occurred to him on the spur of the 

 moment. There was just one point which it seemed to him 

 Mr. Johnston had rather omitted to give prominence to, and 

 that was the competition which a country like Great Britain, 

 and he might say other European countries also, had to con- 

 tend with, more especially in recent years, by the employment 

 of labour sustained at a very small expense as compared with 

 the labour in the countries he had more especially dealt 

 with. Any change in the direction of increased cost of pro- 

 duction of cereals abroad would surely increase the quantity 

 that could be profitably produced at home; and, consequently,, 

 the number of people employed in such production. There 

 was no doubt, looking at the matter broadly, that there was- 



