260 
THIRTEENTH REPORT. 
tence are all resolvable into moral restraint, vice and misery.” Professor 
Patteu in his last book, “The Social Basis of Religion,” says, “Sin is 
misery; misery is poverty; the antidote of poverty is income.” If the 
signs of the times means any thing, there is an increase in the world’s 
income and a potential decrease in the world’s misery through better 
distribution. Misery, then, with its accompanying vice cannot be the 
result of the law of diminishing returns, for returns are increasing. 
Since the mean's of production are land, labor, and capital, and the 
methods of capitalistic-mechanical production increase the possibilities 
of the last two indefinitely, the resources of production show no more 
signs of being exhausted than the heat of the sun. Our census returns 
show that the population of the United States has increased 21% in the 
last decade, that urban population has increased even more, and that 
many of the best rural districts have lost population, and still there 
has been a disproportionate increase in the amount and variety of food. 
These facts make it absurd to argue that, as applied to production in 
the large, the law of diminishing returns is a factor to be considered. 
Why then in the teaching of economics, and in business is not the em- 
phasis changed so that the fallacious Rockefeller point of view will not 
be attained? For obviously, as Patteu says, our modern progressive 
civilization has passed the line of deficit and is capturing broader and 
broader fields of surplus. If we are going to retain a full treatment 
of this law and Malthusanism in our text books, could it not be 
labeled as an historical condition of which occasional relics may still be 
found? In answer to the argument that it is essential that we take the 
law as a starting point for the explanation of economic phenomena, I 
would reply that the explanation is good only for a condition that is 
stationary and looks to the past. May we not demand that iu some 
way economists should frame a law in which, as in the law of the mov- 
ing point by which the hyperbola is traced, the prophesy of the future 
should be as perfectly expressed as the history of the past and thus 
looking ahead, give us a true description of modern conditions of pro- 
duction ? 
Olivet College. April, 1911. 
