“Well; whence this deficiency of food?”
“From the tendency of eaters to increase faster than the supply of food.”
“But if we can raise more food by co-operation than without it....”
“Even supposing we could,—unless co-operation also checked the increase of numbers, it could prove no more than a temporary alleviation of our grievances. In my opinion, it would, if it included equality of condition, leave us in a worse state than it found us, in as far as it would relax the springs of enterprise and industry, and, in time, bring the community down into a deplorable state of sameness; it would, if persevered in, make us into a nation of half-naked potatoe eaters, and water-drinkers.”
The earl inquired whether anything had been heard lately of the co-operative society formed in the neighbourhood of Weston.
“O yes!” replied lord F——. “They are enjoying the benefits of competition to the utmost. They ascribe their prosperity to their co-operation; but they are, in fact, a large partnership in competition with smaller ones. They do not see how their relative position would be altered by their absorbing all their competitors into their firm, with no check to their numbers, while nature has imposed perpetual checks upon the growth of their capital.”
“But cannot numbers be checked,—cannot the checks upon the growth of capital be evaded, while we have such a wide world to move about in?”
“Certainly, my dear: but there is no need of equality of condition to help us to do this. Competition is more likely than co-operation to induce prudence and foresight; and it will quicken our activity in carrying our surplus numbers to distant fertile lands, or in bringing the produce of distant fertile lands among our own people, instead of tempting us to waste more and more of our capital continually in turning up inferior lands at home, as the co-operatives would have us do.”
“But were not you telling me that your rent-roll becomes more valuable as time passes? Are not landholders’ incomes increasing perpetually under the present system?”
“They are; but this is the consequence, not of competition, but of the varying qualities of the land, the tillage of every new grade of which tends to lower profits and raise rents. No plan for the distribution of home produce can affect the law by which the returns to capital are perpetually diminished.”