276 
On l'~alue. 
[Sept, 
o'vess of wealth ; and if the progress of wealth were not such, as to provide for the 
unchecked progress of population, then there must have existed a proportion of the 
community, the lower orders, who were born to no possession ; whose power of 
increasing its income was limited ; and amongst whom the labour necessary for 
realizing a maintenance, for such a family as tended to an increase of population, 
more rapid than was actually .taking place, must have been the very utmost the 
labourers could bestow. 
If, then, this be the case, and under the full influence of the principles with 
which we set out, no other cause could have repressed a more rapid progress of 
population, it follows, that the food actually supporting a family, must have been 
of as great an absolute value to those obtaining it, as it would be when population 
was at a stand, and permitted the rearing of such number of children only, as 
supplied the place of the parents when dead. Larger families will, in the one 
case, have been reared, than in the other ; but in both cases, the individuals, 
actually labouring, must have felt the same regard and esteem for what merely 
sufficed for support of their families ; and must, in both cases, have been equally 
ready to offer their labour for its possession. 
If one man’s labour, at one time, enables him to obtain as much as suffices for 
the support of such family as sustaining a fixed population requires ; and if, at 
another time, equal labour suffices to realize sufficient for a family increasing 
one in number, with every successive generation ; then any specific quantity of 
food obtained, will be of less value, relatively to the labour expended, and con- 
sequently to the society, in the latter, than in the former case. But this value 
must be so very little less, that the difference will be barely perceptible. If, for 
instance, the average life of man were 60 years; and if each poor couple had the 
means of rearing three children, population would be doubled in 120 years; and 
at this rapid rate of increase, the produce of one man’s labour would he only so 
much greater, and the absolute value of specific quantities of food so much less, 
than when population was stationary, by the trifle which sufficed for the support 
of one child. Improvements in agriculture then, from improved instruments, and 
machinery employed in husbandry; and the discovery of new and fertile tracts, 
to be cultivated with the skill and capital of an old and scientific people; if men 
calculated, so to stimulate the ratio of increasing population, as to raise it fioni 
nothing to a doubling, in 120 years; could have but a trifling effect in lowering 
the positive value, or in other words, the estimation, in which the food of a man 
would be held ; and would, in consequence, in a very low degree reduce the com- 
mand of food over labour. 
But countries, I apprehend, have, in reality, become progressively more capable 
of yielding food to increasing numbers, as these additional numbers have sprung 
to manhood ; and of the contingent and ultimate power of supporting increased 
population, previous indications have, in most cases, been hardly perceptible; the 
powers of the soil to yield increase, with increased application of labour, being 
unknown, till that labour had actually been applied ; and in the particular man- 
ner too, actually found to be attended with success. Increasing numbers must 
bring with them increasing knowledge ; and succeeding generations must be be- 
nefiting, not only by the permanent effects of all their predecessors’ labour, but 
by the continually increasing knowledge of facts, handed down from their pro- 
genitors, the accumulated information of ages. The labourer of this generation, 
though he, like his forefathers, succeed to no possession, save this greater know- 
ledge, still adds to this inheritance the results of his own experience ; and his 
successors will, therefore, without the aid of any other possession, be capable of 
working to more advantage than their forefather. 
From this, amongst many other considerations, we may find assurance, that the 
mere circumstance of tracts of country being still under peopled, to what they 
ultimately may be, does not, inevitably, tend to insuring a low value of food ; 
and that population still being scanty, forms no proof, as is assumed, of a low value 
of the lood of the population. If then a nearly constant value be enjoyed by food 
during the whole of a nation’s progress in population and wealth ; if cultivation, 
in the general circumstances of all ordinary countries, must be pressing against the 
limit, which the existing population, and their existing knowledge of productive 
arts, define ; and if it be also true, that capitalists can no longer employ increas- 
ing numbers of labourers, than while, besides these labourer’s wages, an increasing 
profit, also, is realized through them, as I shall hereafter explain more at large ; 
liow, 1 ask, ^an an increasing price, and value of food be continually created, and 
obtained ; which, by tending to a continual rise of wages, it has now become usual 
