May 14, 1886 ] 



SCIENCE. 



447 



price of food may vary without a change in the 

 quantity produced." A little reflection will show 

 that there is a fatal oversight in this argument. 

 It is true that people will not incur a considerable 

 expense in preparing new land for cultivation 

 unless the price of produce is sufficient to enable 

 it to pay rent ; but there is no reason whatever to 

 suppose that the land so brought into cultivation 

 is the worst land in use. There might be a con- 

 siderable fall in the price of food before the land 

 last brought into use at great expense was thrown 

 out of cultivation ; but other and worse land 

 w r ould be thrown out of cultivation, or, w T hat is 

 the same thing economically, it would be less 

 completely cultivated. If the Campagna were 

 drained, no one supposes it would be the worst 

 land in Italy ; and, although a considerable fall 

 in the price of Italian produce might afterwards 

 take place without throwing the Campagna out 

 of cultivation, tin's is not the same as saying that 

 no land in Italy would be thrown out of cultiva- 

 tion. Mr. Patten thinks that the consideration of 

 the expense of bringing new land into cultivation 

 shows that there is no land which does not pay 

 rent : in reality it merely shows that what is 

 chronologically the last land to be cultivated is 

 not always the land which pays no rent. In this, 

 no Ricardian will be disposed to quarrel with him. 



Strange to say, - Mr. Patten, throughout this 

 chapter, altogether ignores the possibility of re- 

 ducing production by applying less capital to 

 land, which is economically equivalent to with- 

 drawing bad land from cultivation. In one of 

 the last chapters he denies the truth of the law 

 of diminishing returns ; the law, namejy, that 

 after a certain point additional applications of 

 labor and capital to a given portion of land yield 

 a smaller return than former applications did. If 

 Mr. Patten's position on this point were correct, 

 the Ricardian theory would be sadly shaken. Mr. 

 Patten fancies the true law to be that of limited 

 returns, not diminishing returns ; and, this fancy 

 having taken hold of his mind, he devotes the 

 main part of a chapter of thirty pages to trying 

 to show that "the proportional return might in- 

 crease up to a point beyond which no additional 

 return could be obtained by any amount of labor." 

 This is as much as to say that it would pay a 

 farmer to apply all the care and all the expense 

 required for fertilizing, draining, watering, and 

 so forth, which was requisite for getting from 

 the soil the largest amount of produce it was 

 physically capable of producing. The position is 

 disproved by the practice of every plain farmer, 

 and by the experience of every ' model ' farmer ; 

 and only the fatuity of a man in love with his 

 own 'discovery' can account for Mr. Patten's 



curious effort to prove the contrary. In point of 

 fact, he does not always bear in mind what it is 

 that he is contending against, as when he says 

 (p. 160), "If no other result were obtained from 

 improved processes than this better utilizing of 

 labor, this result would more than counteract 

 any tendency there may be towards diminishing 

 the return from agriculture." This is not in the 

 least pertinent to the question ; what economists 

 assert is, that, with given processes, capital and 

 labor applied to the soil beyond a certain point 

 produce diminishing proportional returns. 



The third chapter is devoted to a consideration 

 of the law of population. One of the worst cases 

 of easy-going refutation which occur in the book 

 is furnished by the way in which Mr. Patten dis- 

 poses of the method by which Malthus arrived at 

 his conclusion. "He found that in new colonies, 

 where the tendency has the fewest checks, popu- 

 lation frequently doubles itself in twenty-five 

 years, and then concluded that this rate of in- 

 crease represented the natural force of the ten- 

 dency, and that this was the rate at which popu- 

 lation always tends to increase. There are many 

 objections to this method of reasoning which will 

 quickly appear when we apply it to the investiga- 

 tion of other subjects. ... By the same method 

 of reasoning we could prove that all men are 

 natural drunkards, cannibals, adulterers, and 

 murderers, since we find communities in various 

 parts of the world where drunkenness, cannibal- 

 ism, etc., are common." A schoolboy ought to 

 perceive the difference between the two cases. 

 What Malthus found was, that men of the same 

 race, the same civilization, the same religion, the 

 same traditions, multiplied at a much more 

 rapid rate when placed in circumstances which 

 permitted of the easy support of an increasing 

 population than they did when living in an old 

 and thickly settled country. The differences in 

 the rate of increase were observed in the case of 

 like peoples — often of the same people — in dif- 

 ferent circumstances ; and it is ridiculous to put 

 this on a level with a comparison between totally 

 different peoples. If Mr. Patten had reflected 

 that Malthus was neither a fool nor a vain man, 

 but a man profoundly impressed with the impor- 

 tance of arriving at the truth concerning the law 

 of population, he would have been slow to sup- 

 pose that Malthus' position could be so easily over- 

 thrown : and if, after writing his chapter, he had 

 carefully re-read his Malthus, he would have 

 found that most of his criticisms had been very 

 thoroughly answered by Malthus himself. 



We shall look at one more example of the way 

 in which Mr. Patten, in spite of understanding 

 an economic law, goes astray through an unques- 



