= S- 
se cin ae 
¥.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 115 
productiveness of agricultural industry will be at least as great in the 
future, so that under the combined influence of the ‘ narrow capacity of 
the individual human stomach’ and the stationary number of stomachs, 
not only a smaller and ever smaller proportion, but a smaller and smaller 
absolute number of workers will be able to raise food for the whole. 
Even the politicians, who for the most part follow the economists with 
a sixty or seventy years’ lag, are beginning to realise the change, and are 
losing their enthusiasm for schemes for ‘ settling more people on the land,’ 
either in colonies or at home, and thereby increasing the already excessive 
depreciation of agricultural compared with manufactured products. The 
numerous subsidies which they still give to agriculture are mostly of an 
eleemosynary character intended to relieve distress, and the encouragement 
which they give to agricultural production is only an incidental effect, 
unintended and often deplored. They are defended, not on the ground 
that they increase food, but because they are supposed to increase 
employment. 
The necessary change of emphasis applies not only as between food and 
other things, but as between most primary and most finishing industries. 
In face of rapidly growing knowledge and slowly growing or stationary 
population, it is inevitable that the ‘ staple’ or ‘ heavy’ industries which 
provide materials should decline relatively to those which provide finished 
goods and services. The demand for each of such things as pig-iron and 
yards of cloth is easily satiated ; and so also, no doubt, is the demand for 
cricket-bats and chauffeurs. But the minor or ‘lighter’ industries are 
susceptible of an indefinite multiplication which makes the demand for 
_ their products, taken as a whole, insatiable. Increase a person’s power 
of spending, and he will not increase his purchases in weight or bulk so 
much as in refinement of form, so that a richer people will devote a less 
proportion of their labour to producing things like pig-iron and bricks. 
Moreover, the mere fact of the disappearance of rapid increase of popula- 
_ tion tends to increase the proportion of demand which can be satisfied 
from scrap without fresh primary production. So, given a stationary 
population with rapidly increasing knowledge applied to production, we 
_ may expect the already observable tendency towards a less proportion 
of the whole labour-force being employed in the ‘ heavy industries’ and 
a larger in the lighter industries to become more pronounced. Perhaps 
we see this even now in the slight drift of industrial population from the 
North to the South of England which appears to be taking place. 
Another change of emphasis, of little importance on the Continent, 
where the West-Ricardian theory of rent never took real root, but of great 
importance in England and other English-speaking areas, is in respect of 
the landowners’ share of the community’s income. The disappearing 
bugbear of diminishing returns carries away with it the vampire tural 
landlord, who was supposed to prosper exceedingly when diminution of 
returns made food scarce and dear. You all know the famous passage in 
which J. S. Mill described the landlords as they appeared to him and the 
school which he, a little belatedly, represented :— 
‘The ordinary progress of a society which increases in wealth is at 
Fall times tending to augment the incomes of landlords ; to give them 
both a greater amount and a greater proportion of the wealth of the 
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