Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/776

752 No other animal has jet developed the powers of reflection, forecast, and imagination, which not only create new wants among men, but which also develop the powers by means of which these wants can be supplied. All other animals are dominated by the physical forces of Nature. Man alone dominates these forces, giving them a new direction, tending constantly to the increase of the means of subsistence at a much more rapid rate than the increase of the population.

For untold ages the wind-swept prairies of the great Mississippi Valley had served to nourish a few millions of bisons which, ranging from north to south and grazing as they went, maintained a certain proportion of animal life to the means of subsistence, while a small number of Indians warring among themselves and showing no signs of progressive development sparsely occupied what is now the granary of the world. Presently came upon the scene men who had learned how to direct the forces of iron, steel, and steam. All the material conditions were changed under the power of the directing mind of man. From that valley are distributed the means of subsistence without which even in the present year disastrous famines would have devastated Europe. No man yet knows or can measure the potential or the productive energy of a single acre of land anywhere in ratio to the labor put upon it. We stand at the very beginning of progress in scientific agriculture, leading to lessened labor and increased product.

In the mind of Malthus and of Ricardo land appears to have been regarded as a mine subject like mines of metal to exhaustion. We are but beginning to learn that land is but an instrument or a laboratory responding in its products to the minimum of labor and the maximum of intelligence.

In order that we may fully comprehend the true nature and source of the increased production of the means of subsistence throughout the centuries, we must give regard to the relative insignificance of accumulated capital as compared to mental capital or experience. Material wealth counts but little as compared to mental capital. I have often had occasion to refer to the fact that the richest and most prosperous state in the world may possibly accumulate capital to the measure of three or possibly four years of production. Several years since I made a very accurate measure of the total valuation of all the mills, works, railroads, dwelling houses, goods and wares, tools and implements of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, standing for the savings in a concrete or material form of more than two centuries of progress. They did not then equal the measure of three years' consumption. That which is the wealth of one generation is destroyed by the inventor who substitutes better mechanism for purposes of production and distribution. The entire profit