capital is formed from the annual savings of labor. Four million pounds a year go from Ireland to absentee landlords, and eight million pounds are taken away every year in taxes. The Irish people can make no savings. There can be no increase of their capital. Starvation or emigration is their inevitable fate.

Is it possible that there should be a surplus of capital?

It is evident that there may become such a surplus, if we assume that production itself does not expand in the meantime. Given a certain industry, within defined limits, it may become full and overflowing with its accumulations. By economy and thrift, these multiply fast, and crowd their barriers. Common observation shows this to be often true, with the enterprises of individuals. The excess is transferred to other branches, or withdrawn for personal gratifications. A seamstress, who, by saving, obtains a sewing machine, has a wonderful help in her industry; but a second sewing machine would not assist her a single stitch.

The same is true of special occupations. The limit of profitable production being reached, the amount of capital employed cannot well be increased. The product, being generally in the form of circulating capital, now flows off to other business, or is turned to purposes of adornment and culture.

The same is also found true, though more rarely, of entire communities. States and cities sometimes reach the limits within which they desire to use capital in their traditional industries. They become bankers for the world, or direct their profits to sumptuous houses and works of art. Such were Genoa and Venice under the merchant princes, who, having reached the boundaries of known trade, and brought all its machinery to the perfection of existing art, began, wisely enough at first, that wonderful career of architecture, whose ultimate extravagance exhausted the industry that gave it rise, and passed the commerce of the world to traders who had not become gentlemen.

It is evident, then, that, within the bounds of present occupations, capital might easily attain a surplus, increasing as it can more rapidly than population. It is productive only as applied by labor; and therefore its production is limited by the capacities of labor.

But in fact, and on the whole of things, the limits of industry do not remain the same. Wants expand, as we have seen. Capital is relieved from its former employments, and goes on to new efforts. It can hardly multiply fast enough to meet the growing demand. Enterprises spring up over night. Capital hardly breathes, for the work it has to do.

We believe that the time when capital shall become excessive in the world is far beyond the occasions of reasonable calculation. It is so distant at the nearest, so doubtful every way, as not to be a question in a practical science, like political economy. We are not called on to provide for the day when all the continents shall be crowded with wealth that can find no room to work. When wealth ceases to be wanted for capital, it is pretty certain to be consumed in luxury. Yet we are not to anticipate the same rapid progress at all times and everywhere which we see in a new country like our own, full of wants, and stimulated to efforts. Capital has its checks, just as population has. Theoretically, steady increase is certain in both practically, each meets obstacles; is lost here, and checked there. The forces which operate to stay it may be briefly summed up as follows: a certain disinclination of capital to emigrate; the lessening power of personal supervision from a distance; and a distrust in the administration of foreign laws.

Another constant force operating against the increase of capital is found in those wants of man which do not look to reproduction. The desire to spend is just as truly in human nature as the desire to earn, and can be as accurately calculated. Hence it follows, that, as the desire to

earn loses power by capital becoming plenty and cheap, the desire to spend gains force. A man is not nearly as likely to use his money for personal gratification when he can get eight per cent for it, as when he can get only four.

Yet, for all these obstacles, capital, when it has supplied the demands of labor in its own vicinity, has gone abroad to colonize. It has carried on great wars in which it had no interest, has developed the resources of infant states, and saved old nations tottering to their fall. Capital has gone round the world in the same boat with the inspired discoverer. It watched with Columbus the weeds drifting from an unknown land; it "stared at the Pacific" by the side of stout Cortes; it debarked with the gallant Cook, nor was it frightened at the savage violence which took his life. Like Cæsar, it would not wait for the boat to come to land. It freighted vessels for countries not named; it sent fleets to ports never visited by civilized man.

CHAPTER XI.

THE CO-OPERATION OF CAPITAL (concluded).

2d, The union of capital and labor will be most effective, when each is sure of its just reward. If the rights of man as a holder of property are sacred, and his rights as laborer equally so, the greatest motive to production can be secured. If otherwise, the creation of wealth will be restricted. Men will not work or save, unless sure of their reward.

There cannot come, out of the earth or heaven, a blow that levels all industry in the dust so quickly and hopelessly as wrong done between labor and capital.* Pestilence, drouth,

* It will be recollected that production carried on by slaves is done wholly by capital: the producer being a chattel, the whole product is that of capital.

or floods do not so thoroughly and permanently prostrate the strength and hopes of a country as a breath of suspicion on the union of the two great agents of production. Then comes an antagonism, indeed, fatal to both. There is hardly any climate or soil so unpropitious that man will not struggle on, earning his livelihood with much endurance, and laying something by for the future. There is hardly any government so rigorous as wholly to suppress the energy of its people. There is hardly any taxation so exhaustive that something still cannot be got out of Nature for man. In all these difficulties, the motive to exertion is not destroyed. But if foul play or legal fraud comes between labor or capital and their reward, the very life of industry ceases at the thought. The spring of work is broken. Its admirable parts and its cunning mechanism are useless, motionless. The exactions and oppressions of the old regime had not so broken the spirit of France, but that her population and her wealth went on increasing, slowly, painfully, but constantly, certainly. The Revolution came; the Convention questioned the rights of property, confiscated the estates of nobles, and sequestered the entire endowment of the Church. Half this would have been enough for ruin. The industry of France dropped where it stood. In a few months, the Convention was devising schemes by which work should be provided by the State for all its citizens. Capital had fled to the dark places of the kingdom. Labor was helpless, crippled, starving. What had wrought all this? The violation of rights. Property was discredited; capital outlawed; labor prostrate.

Labor is the first to suffer. Its wants are instant, immediate, vital. Capital, in such economical convulsions, has the privilege of leviathan. It can dive down to the depths, and give up breathing for a while. If labor goes under, it dies.

It is familiar to every reader of history how the brutal rapacity of the Spanish conquerors terrified the nations of

Peru and the Antilles, and shut up the treasures of the New World in a secrecy that even torture could not break. The wisdom of the man that owned the hen that laid the golden egg has been embodied a thousand times in the acts of government. The result is never the enriching of one; it is ever the ruin of all. Wealth itself becomes valueless, since it has no security in possession, and only excites the cupidity of the common tyrant.

If such is admitted to be the effect of occasional invasions of property rights, either in labor or capital, we shall be prepared to explain the barrenness of many countries the oldest and best endowed of the world.

The dreariness of Asia rises in eloquent vindication of the harmonies of natural law. A perfidious and cruel despotism has there made property undesirable. Man finds safety only in poverty and degradation. The Jewish is perhaps the only people that has pursued wealth steadily and unremittingly, in spite of injustice and robbery.

3d, The union of labor and capital is most effective when the latter is appropriately distributed. Capital creates no values by its own powers. It must be joined with labor. Somebody must use it, bring his personal energies to bear upon it, set it in motion, watch its operations, work with it. The farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer, must each bestow constant attention on the capital he employs, or no good will come of it. The more intense and vigilant the application, the more certain the return, the larger the profits. This is a well-known practical principle; and from it follows that the point will be reached where an individual has so much capital under his control that his entire efforts, by himself and those working under his direction, are not sufficient to secure its greatest effectiveness. Of course, in such a case, it is economically right that the excess of capital should be transferred to some other position, where its full productiveness can be obtained.

Such limitations are highly beneficial to society; for, were