Page:What are the causes of the distressed state of the Highlands of Scotland?.pdf/16

16 in to the relative productiveness of large and small farms from the case of Scotland. As far as Scotland is concerned, the question of large and small farms remains to be tested; for all that the facts really warrant us in saying is, that large farmers, with perfect security for all the capital employed, are more successful than small crofters without any security at all. And yet, how many farms have been consolidated, how many tenants cleared off, on the belief that large farms must necessarily, under all circumstances, be more productive than small holdings?

This question of large and small cultivation is one on which public writers and scientific economists have spent a great deal of time, without arriving at any very profitable results; a circumstance which, I believe, arises mainly from the very shallow investigation of the exact circumstances of each district where the different systems prevail.

Were the subject investigated with care, the results would, I believe, establish that each system has advantages peculiar to itself, which, in a perfectly free system, will always lead to its adoption in those districts and in those stages of social progress where its peculiar advantages make it more profitable than the opposite system. The true business of political economists is not to exhibit any partiality on the one side or the other. Neither to think that a strict and strong-minded adherence to principle can be shown by defending large capitalist farmers; nor, on the other hand, to attempt to gain credit for sentimental benevolence by praising cottier tenants and peasant proprietors. What political economy teaches on the subject is, that it was intended by the all-wise Creator of the universe that there should always be producers on a small scale and producers on a large scale, each class having a special province assigned to them by those laws of competition which, when emancipated from human interference, completely regulate production throughout the world. And that the only force necessary to prevent the undue extension of either system, to prevent too great a subdivision, or too great an aggregation of land, is the force of free competition.