[27] From 1716 to 1770 the cotton manufactured in this country annually averaged under two and a half million pounds weight. From 1771 to 1775 it was four million seven hundred thousand pounds. From 1781 to 1785 it was eleven million pounds. From 1791 to 1795 it was twenty-six million pounds; and from 1795 to 1800 it was thirty-seven million pounds.
[28] Pitt estimated that the hands employed in spinning increased from forty thousand to eighty thousand between the years 1760 and 1790.
[29] Were any confirmation of this conclusion needed, it is afforded us by the fact that in 1786 a spinner received ten shillings a pound for spinning cotton of a certain quality: in 1795 he had received only eightpence, or a fifteenth part of ten shillings; and yet in the course of a similar day’s labour, he made more money than he had been able to do under the former scale of payment. The price of spinning No. 100 was ten shillings per pound in 1786; in 1793, two shillings and sixpence. The subsequent drop to eightpence coincided with the application of machinery to the working of the mule.
[30] Were this work a treatise on political economy, rather than a work on practical politics, in which only the simplest and most fundamental economic principles are insisted on, I should have here introduced a chapter on the special and peculiar part which fixed capital, other than machinery, plays in agriculture. I have not done so, however, for fear of interrupting the thread of the main argument; but it will be useful to call the reader’s attention to the subject in a note.
It was explained in the last chapter that rent (to speak with strict accuracy) is not to be described as the product of superior soils, but rather as the product of the qualities which make such soils superior—qualities which are present in them and which in poorer soils are absent. Now in speaking of rent, we assumed these superior qualities to be natural. As a matter of fact, however, in highly cultivated countries, many of them are artificial. They have been added to the soil by human exertion—for instance by the process of draining; or they have been actually placed in the soil, as by the process of manuring. In this way land and capital merge and melt into one another, and illustrate each other’s functions as productive agents. It is impossible to imagine a more complete and beautiful example of the relation between the two. At this point the rent of Capital and the rent of Land become indistinguishable.
[31] In a state where the employing class were physically the masters of the employed, Wage Capital would be unnecessary for the employer. A system of forced labour might take its place.
[32] This was Pitt’s computation. See Lecky, History of England during the Eighteenth Century, vol. vi. chap. xxiii.
[33] The amount of land, formerly waste, that was added to the cultivable area during the last century, was in England and Wales not more than sixteen per cent of the total.
[34] The rental of Great Britain in 1750 was about thirteen million five hundred thousand pounds, and in 1800 about twenty-nine million six hundred thousand pounds. According to the estimates of Arthur Young, the farmer’s income somewhat more. The wages of Agricultural Labour had not risen proportionately.
[35] See Encyclopædia Britannica, first and earlier editions.