Chapter VII. Of The Law Of The Increase Of Labor.
§ 1. The Law of the Increase of Production Depends on those of Three Elements—Labor. Capital, and Land.
Production is not a fixed but an increasing thing. When not kept back by bad institutions, or a low state of the arts of life, the produce of industry has usually tended to increase; stimulated not only by the desire of the producers to augment their means of consumption, but by the increasing number of the consumers.
We have seen that the essential requisites of production are three—labor, capital, and natural agents; the term capital including all external and physical requisites which are products of labor, the term natural agents all those which are not. The increase of production, therefore, depends on the properties of these elements. It is a result of the increase either of the elements themselves, or of their productiveness. We proceed to consider the three elements successively, with reference to this effect; or, in other words, the law of the increase of production, viewed in respect of its dependence, first on Labor, secondly on Capital, and lastly on Land.
§ 2. The Law of Population.
The increase of labor is the increase of mankind; of population. The power of multiplication inherent in all organic life may be regarded as infinite. There are many species of vegetables of which a single plant will produce in one year the germs of a thousand; if only two come to maturity, in fourteen years the two will have multiplied to sixteen thousand and more. It is but a moderate case of fecundity in animals to be capable of quadrupling their numbers in a single year; if they only do as much in half a century, [pg 113] ten thousand will have swelled within two centuries to upward to two millions and a half. The capacity of increase is necessarily in a geometrical progression: the numerical ratio alone is different.
To this property of organized beings, the human species forms no exception. Its power of increase is indefinite, and the actual multiplication would be extraordinarily rapid, if the power were exercised to the utmost. It never is exercised to the utmost, and yet, in the most favorable circumstances known to exist, which are those of a fertile region colonized from an industrious and civilized community, population has continued, for several generations, independently of fresh immigration, to double itself in not much more than twenty years.
| Years. | Population. | Food. |
| 25 | 11 mills | x |
| 25 | 22 mills | 2x |
| 25 | 44 mills | 3x |
| 25 | 88 mills | 4x |
| 25 | 176 mills | 5x |