MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
S3 
farming, are similarly evidences of this great human dependency upon 
the proper use of land in connection with labor and machinery. 
No other single principle is so widely useful in the organization of a 
farm as is the redirected law of diminishing returns which is beginning 
to be known as the law of proportionality. I refer here to that inter- 
pretation of the law of diminishing returns which has to do with the 
mal-proportionality of the factors toward each oilier rather than with 
the phase of the law which deals with limits. As commonly stated “a 
time arrives in the application of labor to land when a further applica- 
tion of labor will not yield proportionate results.” In other words the 
two factors are wrongly adjusted to each other for the best returns, 
which is simply another way of describing that common phenomenon in 
a world of mis-fits, a mal-proportion. Avoiding the error of applying 
factors to each other in wrong proportions, which the law of diminish- 
ing returns so perfectly describes, and we exercise the law of propor- 
tionality — a law which Professor Fetter asserts is the “central and 
essential thought in Political Economy since it is the expression of the 
fundamental axiomatic truth that there is a best or proper adjustment 
throughout the world of means and ends.” It is this law of propor- 
tionality therefore which draws the essential elements and processes 
of a farm into a proper system and furnishes us with the suitable basis 
for farm organization. 
This order producing efficacy of proportionality, which we have pic- 
tured. needs little more than merely to be mentioned and our memories 
immediately furnish us with proofs innumerable from many fields of 
its ubiquity and potency. 
Technologically there is no product which comes from the various 
crafts or trades or industries which is not indebted to this law of right 
proportioning. In art and music and literature proportion reigns 
supreme. In nature it is the balancing of the forces and elements, or 
their proper proportionality toward each other, which prevents chaos 
while in the moral world the ethical ideals of symmetry and harmony 
are under obligations to the law of proportions since they are said to 
be related to a wise observance of the “golden mean.” A common book 
of recipes will give many thousands of formulae for combining things in 
their right proportions. The apothecaries art and that of the culinary 
expert is a matter of putting things together in their right proportions 
while the science of chemistry is so largely concerned with this subject 
that an entire variety of associative ratios goes by the name of chemi- 
cal proportions. 
A principle of such universal employment could scarcely fail of ap- 
plicability to farming but it is the essentialness with which it applies 
to every aspect of this art which gives to it the prime importance as a 
law of agricultural organization. Upon this principle of proportionality, 
for example, rests the determination of the farm area — in what pro- 
portions it will be profitable to use land with a given amount of labor 
and capital and in what proportion it will not be profitable. The ques- 
tion too of intensive or extensive cultivation is the reverse side of the 
same problem and consequently is a problem in proportionality. The 
class significance of the suitable proportioning of land and labor which 
is involved in this question of big farms or little farms, is also of al- 
most incalculable importance to the farmers. Is it the American ideal 
