172 ROOT MATTERS IN SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS. 



supply. It also spurs industry and invention in the direction 

 of lessening cost, all of which benefits inevitably are reaped 

 by the community. No gratuitous element entering into 

 products can ever form part of exchange price so long as there 

 are many competitors and free competition. In the case of 

 the products of agriculture, too, there is the greatest possible 

 security against the arbitrary acts of monopolists in the 

 hugeness and the universality of producing operations which 

 can be focused at any point of demand in the globe by the 

 mighty steamships on the ocean highway, and which would 

 require omnipotence and omnipresence to monopolise. 



If any one country had a monopoly of the production 

 and supply of an important product of the land, such as 

 wheat, I frankly admit that the owners of more fertile parts 

 would reap the sole advantage of this limited gratuitous gift 

 of Nature (the one rent of Political Economists), provided that 

 in the acquirement of these more valuable parts the present or 

 original possessor had not given the state or community an 

 equivalent in purchase value ; but this monopoly of good 

 lands, while securing a better return locally as compared with 

 poor lands, may not secure as much additional profit as the 

 difference in the fertility of rich and poor lands would seem 

 to indicate. 



The world's supply, if not artificially barred or shut out from 

 any country, determines the actual price of corn, and it is 

 significant that America, with her bonanza method of farming 

 on a scale far grander than is possible in England, is enabled, 

 with a much lower natural yield per acre, to grow grain 

 cheaper, and in much larger quantities than in England ; and 

 consequently she regulates the price of corn in England more 

 by her methods and scale of farming than by higher fertility 

 of soil. The nature of the season's rainfall, too, falling 

 indifferently, and often irregularly on good or bad tracts of 

 lands, and sometimes restricted in sufficient quantity for 

 produce, a high yield to particular provinces further breaks 

 the influence of fixed fertility of soil in any one country as a 

 regulator of price. The mere difference of fertility of soil of 

 any one country may not, therefore, be the dominating 

 influence in determining price to consumer, and hence the 

 consumer may even have the advantage of the gratuitous 

 influence — a more fertile soil — in reducing the general average 

 of the price of com. 



In the century ending 188S it is estimated that the popu- 

 lation of Europe and North America increased from 150 to 470 

 millions, that is, 180 per cent. This must have correspond- 

 ingly increased the demand for food and the unearned 

 increment of land. Notwithstanding this, such were the 

 mighty effects of steam and electricity introduced, adding to 



