380 
DUTTON. 
make more of this blood and put it in order. All this is in 
harmony with popular ideas of economic pathology, and it 
is not at all surprising that the call for blood-purifiers is 
urgent. 
To diagnose the real cause of the depression of agriculture 
requires no assumption of peculiar wisdom, but does call 
for a great deal of candor. Any man has but to open his 
eyes and it is as plain as the Washington monument from 
the south windows of the Treasury. The cause is world¬ 
wide. Monetary conditions have absolutely nothing to do 
with it. The industrial revolutions of the last fifty years, 
having profoundly modified almost every other industry, 
have at last begun to operate with resistless force upon the 
oldest, the greatest, and the most deeply rooted of all human 
occupations—agriculture itself. The old regime of agri¬ 
culture is doomed and must give way to a new one. To 
oppose it is as futile and hopeless as the effort to sway the 
motion of the earth in its orbit. Nearly all other great in¬ 
dustries have been compelled to undergo their metamorpho¬ 
sis, and the turn of agriculture has now come. As with 
the others there has been suffering during the transition 
epoch, so will there be suffering with the transition of agri¬ 
culture ; as with the others there has at length resulted a 
general increase of benefits, so will it be in agriculture. It 
will end in greater comfort and an improved condition for 
all mankind; but the transition stage will be one of depres¬ 
sion to the industry which is transformed. That the change 
will be resisted and that resistance will aggravate the suffer¬ 
ing is to be expected. 
But how is it with the rest of the world ? It has pros¬ 
pered greatly. And yet most people cannot see it so. The 
mercantile and some of the manufacturing classes are com¬ 
plaining. Of what? That profits are small. And this is 
true. Profits are decreasing—not the aggregate profits, per¬ 
haps, but certainly the rate of profit. Political economy 
teaches us that the rate of profit always tends to a mini¬ 
mum, and, though occasional disturbances or upheavals and 
