Page:Manual of Political Economy.djvu/94



HE three requisites of production, labour, appropriate natural agents, and capital, have now been discussed. The subject of the production of wealth will not be complete without an investigation of some of the laws upon which depends the amount or degree of productiveness of each of these requisites. All the materials upon which labour and capital are employed, are produced either directly or indirectly from the land. Wool is not a product of the land like cotton and timber, but the sheep from which the wool is clipped are fed by food obtained from the land. Land, labour, and capital are, therefore, the three requisites of production. The most casual observer will have noticed that each of these varies greatly in productiveness at different times, and in different places. Some of the richest tracts of land in England were not long since an uncultivated morass; Cambridgeshire and Norfolk are now amongst the largest corn-producing counties, yet Cambridge was once the home of the bittern and snipe, and Norfolk was little better than a rabbit-warren. At the present time England possesses land of every degree of fertility; the rich loam land of Sussex and the Lothians will let for 4l. an acre; and large tracts of land on the moors of Yorkshire, if given to a farmer rent free, would not pay to be cultivated. There is also the greatest difference in the efficiency of labour. It has been calculated that an English mower will do as much work in a day as three Russian serfs, and the contractors for the French railways found that an English navvy was worth two