| £ | |
| Slit-iron, for nails | 1.10 |
| Natural steel | 1.42 |
| Horseshoes | 2.55 |
| Gun-barrels, ordinary | 9.10 |
| Wood-saws | 14.28 |
| Scissors, best | 446.94 |
| Penknife-blades | 657.14 |
| Sword-handles, polished steel | 972.82 |
It can not, however, be said of such manufactures as coarse cotton cloth, wherein the increased cost of raw cotton causes an immediate effect upon the price of the cloth, that the cost of the materials forms but a small portion of the cost of the manufacture.[138]
All the labor [not engaged in preparing materials] tends constantly and strongly toward diminution, as the amount of production increases. Manufactures are vastly more susceptible than agriculture of mechanical improvements and contrivances for saving labor. In manufactures, accordingly, the causes tending to increase the productiveness of industry preponderate greatly over the one cause which tends to diminish it; and the increase of production, called forth by the progress of society, takes place, not at an increasing, but at a continually diminishing proportional cost. This fact has manifested itself in the progressive fall of the prices and values of almost every kind of manufactured goods during two centuries past; a fall accelerated by the mechanical inventions of the last seventy or eighty years, and susceptible [pg 143] of being prolonged and extended beyond any limit which it would be safe to specify. The benefit might even extend to the poorest class. The increased cheapness of clothing and lodging might make up to them for the augmented cost of their food.
There is, thus, no possible improvement in the arts of production which does not in one or another mode exercise an antagonistic influence to the law of diminishing return to agricultural labor. Nor is it only industrial improvements which have this effect. Improvements in government, and almost every kind of moral and social advancement, operate in the same manner. We may say the same of improvements in education. The intelligence of the workman is a most important element in the productiveness of labor. The carefulness, economy, and general trustworthiness of laborers are as important as their intelligence. Friendly relations and a community of interest and feeling between laborers and employers are eminently so. In the rich and idle classes, increased mental energy, more solid instruction, and stronger feelings of conscience, public spirit, or philanthropy, would qualify them to originate and promote the most valuable improvements, both in the economical resources of their country and in its institutions and customs.
§ 5. Law Holds True of Mining.
We must observe that what we have said of agriculture is true, with little variation, of the other occupations which it represents; of all the arts which extract materials from the globe. Mining industry, for example, usually yields an increase of produce at a more than proportional increase of expense.
It does worse, for even its customary annual produce requires to be extracted by a greater and greater expenditure of labor and capital. As a mine does not reproduce the coal or ore taken from it, not only are all mines at last exhausted, but even when they as yet show no signs of exhaustion they must be worked at a continually increasing cost; shafts must be sunk deeper, galleries driven farther, greater power applied to keep them clear of water; the produce must be [pg 144] lifted from a greater depth, or conveyed a greater distance. The law of diminishing return applies therefore to mining in a still more unqualified sense than to agriculture; but the antagonizing agency, that of improvements in production, also applies in a still greater degree. Mining operations are more susceptible of mechanical improvements than agricultural: the first great application of the steam-engine was to mining; and there are unlimited possibilities of improvement in the chemical processes by which the metals are extracted. There is another contingency, of no unfrequent occurrence, which avails to counterbalance the progress of all existing mines toward exhaustion: this is, the discovery of new ones, equal or superior in richness.
Professor Jevons has applied this economic law to the industrial situation of England.[139] While explaining that the supply of cheap coal is the basis of English manufacturing prosperity, yet he insists that, if the demand for coal is constantly increasing, the point must inevitably be reached in the future when the increased supply can be obtained only at a higher cost. When coal costs England as much as it does any other nation, then her exclusive industrial advantage will cease to exist. In the United States the outlying iron deposits of Lake Superior, Lake Champlain, and Pennsylvania, so geologists tell us, will find competition arising from the new grades of greater productiveness in the richer deposits of States like Alabama. In that case we shall be going from poorer to better grades of iron-mines, but after the change is made a series of different grades of productiveness will be established as before.
To resume: all natural agents which are limited in quantity are not only limited in their ultimate productive power, but, long before that power is stretched to the utmost, they yield to any additional demands on progressively harder terms. This law may, however, be suspended, or temporarily controlled, by whatever adds to the general power of mankind over nature, and especially by any extension of their knowledge, and their consequent command, of the properties and powers of natural agents.