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F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 111 
assert that though the people of his time were better off than the people 
of a thousand years before, they would have been still better off if the 
increase of population had been less. 
The economic history of the hundred years has tended to bring about 
a very complete reversal of economists’ view of this matter. 
The hundred years began with developments which threw great dis- 
eredit on the fundamental assumption of the old school that the extension 
of human occupation of land necessarily meant that less fertile and less 
well-situated land must be occupied as numbers grew. It was easy for 
men who saw arable cultivation creeping over barren hills in England and 
stony ‘bogs’ in Ireland to believe in that theory when Chicago was a 
collection of Indian huts, and Broadway, New York, a rough cart track to a 
farm, but the application of steam to ships and railways enabled mankind 
to extend easily over an immense area of land more fertile than much of 
what was occupied before. And as for situation, not only did the improve- 
ment in transport, coupled with the violations of natural geography 
_ involved in the cutting of the great ship canals, bring the ‘ more distant ’ 
lands nearer the ‘ market,’ it also eventually brought ‘ the market’ to the 
“more distant ’ lands. 
So we no longer think of the first cradle of the human race (or the first 
cradles of the human races if there are more than one) as the most fertile 
and well-situated spot (or spots) from which men have gradually been 
forced outwards. You all probably know the opinion of the British Army 
in Mesopotamia, expressed by the sergeant who was told by an officer that 
he was now on the very site of the Garden of Eden: ‘ Well, Sir, all I can 
say is that if this was the Garden of Eden it’s no wonder the twelve 
apostles mutinied.’ Though the sergeant was evidently not a well-read 
man, the change of view had reached even him. 
Later in the hundred years scientific discovery in various directions 
has led to a complete change of emphasis in regard to the importance of 
what the old economists used to call ‘improvements.’ The old economists 
thought of hedges and ditches, drains, and a few other trifles of that 
kind which would enable corn to be more easily produced from European 
fields, and just a little of better breeding of cattle and sheep. These were 
‘things which might, they believed, interrupt for a time, now and then, 
the general downward drift of the returns to agricultural industry, but 
could not do more than that. Modern science has changed our outlook. 
We set no bounds to the possibilities of improvement. We expect to 
aake unwholesome areas healthy, and to modify vegetable as well as 
animal products so that they will better serve our “needs. Primitive 
‘mankind presumably fought and killed some of the now extinct carni- 
Vora ; advanced mankind fights and will kill the locusts and the smaller 
ects which have hitherto prevented much use being made of some of 
the most fertile areas of the world. It was not an economist who, only 
a few years ago in the Presidential chair of the Association, foretold that 
very soon the world would be suffering from a shortage of wheat. 
Thus, even if we still expected population to increase very rapidly, we 
hould not believe, as J. §. Mill did, that it ‘everywhere treads close on 
the heels of agricultural improvement, and effaces its effects as fast as 
_ they are produced ’ (Principles, Bk. IV, ch. iii, § 5). But in fact, Cotter 
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