256 
THIRTEENTH REPORT. 
they outstrip even our imagination. Now, to be sure, individual far- 
mers must have practical methods of directing the expenditure of what 
capital and labor the}' have, and the law applies to them since each 
one is more or less in an eddy, just as I am in the matter of capital. 
I have little more than I had before the last multiplication of the capital 
of the world, but I am not so personal as to deny the increase. I claim 
to be part of the age of airships though I have never seen one and am 
no nearer an automobile than a state of covetousness. I try not to 
be like the woman in a small town who came to me after a lecture in 
which I had said that since three-fourths of the women in that village 
bought their bread from bakeries where it was made by men they could 
retain their power over bread making only by voting, she confidentially 
told me that she made her own bread, and hence did not see anv need 
for women's voting. It seems to me that an economic law ought to be 
comprehensive enough to summarize the individual cases. 
Professor Carver shows conclusively that in an individual case the law 
of diminishing returns may work exactly. He even shows that large scale 
production does not overthrow the principle; but he does not consider 
the pertinent fact of modern industry, that invention, organization and 
efficiency make constantly changing conditions, and that “equal doses'’ 
are out of date. He admits that the law is more evident when applied 
to stationary civilization, saying, “If civilization should remain sta- 
tionary while population increases in density there would be a smaller 
per capita production because of the law of diminishing returns. The 
terrible reality of this law is witnessed by the overcrowding of those 
populations where, as in the unchanging East, civilization has become 
stationary.” “I reply, “to be sure,” but modern economics is neither his- 
tory nor anthropology, and what should be taught in our colleges and 
to John I). Rockefeller, is a principle that applies to a progressive civil- 
ization. Again Carver says, “but with respect to the livelihood of a 
complex population considering all its industries in a mass, the opera- 
tion of the law is not so clearly perceived.” Again I say, “to be sure,” 
because under such conditions it is not operating. And at the eud of 
his long chapter, considering the relative productiveness of different 
sorts of labor, he states, “that nothing could prevent its (the former 
of the cited classes of labor) declining relatively to that of the latter 
class except a radical change in the system of industry, which would 
call for more than a proportional increase in the former class.” The 
contention of this article is that there has been this radical change 
in the system of industry, that increases are becoming more than pro- 
portional and that we are not yet even in sight of the beginning of the 
end. I am perfectly willing to admit that the law of diminishing re- 
turns has an illustrative value, but it is taught in most courses and 
economic articles as though the world in which we live were about to 
suffer from its “terrible reality” as it would in a world of stationary 
civilization. At a recent large gathering of economists there were but 
two expressed exceptions to the opinion that immigration was about 
to become dangerous because the additional numbers would make com- 
petition too keen. They thus implied the fear that this bugbear law of 
diminishing returns will soon deprive us of enough to eat. The whole 
difficulty is a mistake of unjust and unequal distribution of wealth for 
an application of the law of diminishing returns. I presume that Mr. 
