Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/761

. How this and the wage-fund theory mutually support each other is evident. "According to the current doctrine of wages," says Mr. George, "wages fall as increase in the number of laborers necessitates a more minute division of capital; according to the Malthusian theory, poverty appears as increase in population necessitates the more minute division of subsistence. It requires but the identification of capital with subsistence and number of laborers with population to make the two propositions as identical formally as they are substantially." Mr. George does not deny that the capacity of the earth to support life is limited, and that there are, therefore, bounds to the population that can exist, but he does deny that there is any tendency of population to outrun subsistence, or that there has ever been any historic instance of a people unable to continue from such a cause.

In support of this view Mr. George reviews the condition of China, India, and Ireland, to find that in none of them population has yet pressed upon the means of subsistence so as to decrease the relative production of food, or to increase poverty, vice, misery, and crime. The lower animals, indeed, may press against the limits of subsistence. They can only take such food as can be found. With man the case is widely different. By breeding he can take advantage of the greater rate of reproduction of the lower animals and of the reproductive rate of plants. His powers of producing food may be indefinitely expanded, while his rate of reproduction is in the course of civilization not increasing. Historically the doctrine is not found to be true, and it is not consonant with many of the facts of observation. The essence of the doctrine of Malthus is, that the power of producing wealth does not keep pace with population—that in a dense population the power of producing wealth is proportionately less than in a sparse one. It may be objected that "the power of producing wealth" should read "the power of producing food." But, so long as the whole earth can supply enough food for the whole of its inhabitants, the power of producing wealth in any community is equivalent to the power of producing food, because, in consequence of a multitude of exchanges, wealth commands food. That a dense population produces less wealth per member than a sparse one is glaringly at variance with the facts. It is in the very densest population that this power increases enormously in proportion to the number of people. It is to effect this result that all the labor-saving machines exist and all the appliances of exchange have been called into being.

The Malthusian doctrine of population and the wage-fund theory of the relations of labor and capital being disproved, the ground is cleared for a consideration of what their true relations are.

As before stated, all wealth produced must be divided between three things—land, labor, and capital. The shares of these factors in production must stand in some relation with each other, such that two of them being given the other is determined, or that, one being given,