ing there for the mechanic arts, or for the many small occupations which are created by a due regard for the comforts and conveniences of life. The field of employment for skilled industry is consequently limited almost to a span, and the bulk of the people are driven back upon rude labor in agriculture, to ditching, cutting turf, and planting potatoes; the meagre returns from such toil being hardly sufficient to keep them from starvation. The United States, on the other hand, afford a better market for manufactured goods than any other country of equal population on the globe; because the universal prosperity of the community enables them to consume more. If the relation of cause and effect in this proposition be reversed, so as to say that the people consume more because they produce more, it will amount to the same thing, and be equally favorable for the purposes of the argument. More wealth is creted, more is consumed, and the amount of enjoyment is thereby increased.

Ireland has acted upon this rule, laid down by most political economists, always to buy in the cheapest market, whatever may be the effect upon domestic enterprise. Grain and other provision can be raised most cheaply in Ireland, owing to the low rate of wages there; manufactures can be produced to best advantage in England, owing to the abundance of English capital. Ireland, therefore, raises food to buy English manufactures with; and the present condition of the Irish people is the consequence. They have the advantage, it is true, of the offer of the manufactured goods at prices twenty or twenty-five per cent less than what they command in America ;· an advantage which would be more sensibly felt if the Irish were not too poor to purchase them at any price.

The proposition, I think, can be laid down as a general one, that a country, the population of which is chiefly or altogether devoted to agriculture, cannot become wealthy, whatever may be the fertility of its soil or the favorableness of its situation. Of course, its inhabitants must buy manufactures with food; that is, they must exchange the products of rude labor for the products of skilled labor; that is, again, they must give the labor of three persons for the labor of one person. The general principle of economical science is, to cause the industry of a country to take that direction in which it can be applied to the greatest advantage.

Now the fertility of the soil is one advantage, and the capacity of the people for the higher departments of labor, their skill and enterprise, is another. There is no reason for allowing either of these advantages to remain latent or unworked; and in choosing between them, we are to be decided by their comparative amount and importance. Fortunate as this country is in the extent of its territory and the richness of its soil, this advantage is as nothing,

nay, it would turn out to our positive detriment, if, in consideration of it, we should sacrifice the talents and the energies of our people; if we should doom our whole population to the rude labor of turning up the earth, for the sake of the trifling advantage of purchasing our manufactured goods at a little lower price.

The great mistake of Ricardo and his followers, who have done so much to reduce Political Economy to a mere deductive science, all the conclusions in which are obtained by abstract reasoning from a few arbitrarily assumed premises, is, that they generally treat of labor in the abstract, and make no allowance for these differences in the quality of the labor. This error vitiates most of the doctrines of this school respecting the nature of Value, and the distribution of the Value created into the three elements of Rent, Profits, and Wages.

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Even Adam Smith remarks, that “ a small quantity of manufactured produce purchases a great quantity of rude produce. trading and manufacturing country, therefore, naturally purchases, with a small part of its manufactured produce, a great part of the rude produce of other countries; while, on the contrary, a country without trade and manufactures is generally obliged to purchase, at the expense of a great part of its rude produce, a very small part of the manufactured produce of other countries."

One mode in which the encouragement of skilled labor, leading to the interfusion of manufactures and commerce with agriculture, favors the increase of national capital, is, by concentrating the population in cities and towns. Agriculture is necessarily diffusive in its effects; the laborers must be distributed over the whole face of the territory which they cultivate. A few large cities spring up at great distances from each other, as an outlet for the commerce created by the exchange of the surplus agricultural products for manufactured goods and other necessaries brought from abroad. The great agricultural districts of Continental Europe, the wheat

plains of Poland and Southern Russia, find an outlet at the cities of Dantzic and Odessa; and we may remark in passing, that the poverty and general low condition of the inhabitants of these districts show the effects of confining a whole population to the rude labor of tilling the ground. It may be that, from their low capacity, and their want of education and general intelligence, they are incapable of anything better. If so, the fact only strengthens our argument; wherever the capacity exists, if it be not developed, if a field of employment be not offered to it, the same results must follow. Manufactures and commerce, on the other hand, requiring a great division of labor, and also that the participators in the work should be near each other, necessarily create a civic population. They will flourish only in cities and towns, and they are the only means of creating cities and towns.

This principle, perhaps sufficiently obvious in itself, is strikingly illustrated by the differences among the States of this Union. Our Southern and Southwestern States are almost exclusively agricultural; and south of the northern boundary of Virginia and Kentucky, there is but one city, New Orleans, of the first class, numbering over 160,000 inhabitants, and but three cities of the second class, Richmond, Charleston, and Louisville, each numbering over 35,000. These cities, of course, have sprung up from the same causes which sustain Dantzic and Odessa; they afford an outlet for the surplus produce of the vast agricultural districts which depend upon them; manufactures have hardly contributed at all to their growth. If we reckon as civic population those only who dwell in cities or towns having at least 12,000 inhabitants each, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, two manufacturing States, with an aggregate population of only 1,405,686, have nearly as large a civic population as these ten agricultural States, who number in the aggregate about ten millions. The cities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have been created almost entirely by manufacturing enterprise, these States not having any surplus agricultural produce. They are the two most densely populated States in the Union. Wherever there is a considerable fall of water, affording power to move machinery, there a new city springs up, though the soil in the neighborhood should be as barren as the Desert of Sahara. But, under the demand for agricultural produce created by that city, the dry sand and the hard rock are

converted into gardens of fruit and vegetables; while the plain of Eastern Virginia, once almost unsurpassed for fertility, its powers being now exhausted, is relapsing in part into its primitive wild condition.

Cities and towns are the great agents and tokens of the increase of national opulence and the progress of civilization. The revival of effective industry, which preceded, and in part caused, the revival of learning in Europe, took place through the agency of the free towns and great trading-cities, which sprang up most numerously in Germany and Italy, where they afforded a refuge for the arts and the pursuits of peace. Their establishment was the first effective blow given to the feudal institutions of the Continent. Commerce and manufactures, to which their walls afforded protection against the chances of war and the rapacity of the warlike nobles, "gradually introduced order and good government, and with them the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbors, and of servile dependency upon their superiors. By affording a great and ready market for the rude produce of the country, they gave encouragement to its cultivation and further improvement." The word civilization itself, as if to indicate the origin and home of the thing, is derived from civis, the inhabitant of a city. Sismondi attributes the greater humanizing and civilizing influence of the colonies of the ancients over those of the moderns to the fact that the former founded cities, while the latter spread themselves over much land. In the town, man is in the presence of man, not in solitude, abandoned to himself and his passions. The history of the colonization of the borders of the Mediterranean, he says, might also be called the history of the civilization of the human race.

The Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans successively formed colonies upon the same general plan. Each of these nations became in succession the leaders, the masters, of the civilized world in refinement, learning, and the arts; and the colonies which they established were the means of diffusing these blessings among the rude tribes within whose territories the new settlements were formed. When the mother country became too populous, when the inhabitants of its wall-enclosed cities became straitened for room, detachments of them were sent out to found new

homes for themselves on the coasts of other lands. The colony was to take care of itself, to be independent of the mother country, from the outset. Hence, to protect themselves against the savage tribes among whom they came to dwell, they were obliged, as the first step, to build a city and encircle it with fortifications. Within its walls they all slept; and they did not wander so far from its precincts during the daytime, but that they could at any hour hear the trumpet-call, which, like the alarm-bell of modern times, might summon them back to the defence of the walls. Hence they cultivated only a narrow territory, lying within sight of, or at a short distance from, the city; and to obtain food from this restricted space for their whole number, they were obliged to exhaust all the arts of cultivation upon it: it was tilled, and it bloomed, like a garden. For greater security, a portion of it was generally enclosed within the fortifications. This pomoerium, or cultivated space under the walls, was usually divided into small strips, and allotted to the several heads of families among the citizens. A portion of the colonists devoted themselves to tillage, and raised food enough, or nearly enough, for the whole city. A larger portion within the walls applied themselves to the mechanic arts and to commerce, exchanging their manufactured goods for food, either with their own agricultural citizens, or with the native inhabitants of the soil, when they could open peaceful intercourse with them, or with the denizens of other shores, perhaps of the mother country, to which they sent their ships.

As they needed only a narrow strip of territory, which they often obtained by fair purchase from the aborigines, the hostility of the latter was not excited; and the mutual benefits of trade being soon felt, the natives came to regard the colonists as their benefactors and best friends. A knowledge of the arts, a taste for the comforts and luxuries of life, learning and religion, were thus diffused among them; and in their simplicity and gratitude, they often reverenced the authors of their civilization as superhuman beings, and paid them divine honors. Many, if not most, of the gods and goddesses of ancient mythology were originally only the founders of art-bringing, knowledge-and-religion-diffusing colonies, whose beneficent influence, handed down to grateful remembrance by tradition, really seemed to admiring posterity divine. The colony, the city, was opulent and refined from the beginning;