[. Bead before the Texas Academy of Science , December 31, 1896. ] 
THE ECONOMICS OF CONCENTRATED CAPITAL. 
BY MAJOR C. E. DUTTON. 
About 200 years ago Gregory King, one of the oldest English statis- 
ticians, computed that the cost of transporting a bushel of wheat by land 
a distance of sixty miles usually exceeded the cost of producing it at the 
farm. Eighty years later Adam Smith made a similar investigation, and, 
though the country roads of England had been considerably improved, 
he found that on the average the cost of transporting wheat about sev- 
enty miles was nearly equal to the cost of production. These and many 
similar facts explain some of the most important differences between the 
commerce of the past and that of the present. 
In those days, the market of each producer was greatly limited in its 
geographical extent by the cost of transportation. Each town and vil- 
lage, and often a single landed estate, produced within itself, or in its 
near surroundings, most of the ordinary necessities of life. To a far 
greater extent than now this applied not only to the first fruits of the 
soil, but also to the working of them up into more finished products. 
The wool was shorn, the flax grown and bleached, in the near neighbor- 
hood. The yarn was spun in the households; evenings were spent around 
the firesides with the women knitting. Homespun clothing was the 
common wear. Families brewed their own ale, made their own bacon 
and pork, and cured their Michaelmas beef for the winter. If the flour 
box was getting empty, the head of the family sallied forth to a farmer 
and dickered for a sack of wheat or rye, which he flung behind his saddle 
and trotted off to the village grist mill. Then began the usual conflict 
of wit and thrift about the miller’s toll and the quality and quantity of 
the flour, the miller not always getting the best of it. The memory of 
these conflicts still survives in the familiar proverb, “Never send a boy 
to the mill.” 
INFLUENCES OF EARLY TRANSPORTATION. 
Inland commerce, therefore, dealt most largely in commodities of 
higher finish, containing great value in small bulk; and the same was 
true to a marked extent in foreign commerce. Thus the great cost of 
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