A good harvest that is general over the world sends activity like an electric current through the economic system. A bad harvest, if universal, would cause universal depression; not agriculture alone must suffer, but manufacture, commerce, science, art, literature, education, recreation—for on the production of food depends the buying power of the whole trading world. It is true that modern countries are not maintained from their own food resources alone. Also, it is true that the machinery of exchange—money and our vast credit system—enter into the phenomena and confuse the student’s mind. Nevertheless, an all-important fact discloses itself on close investigation, viz., this—the relation of landlordism to modern civilization is not accidental, it is essential and causal. As already shown, the general drift of the produce of the land has been into the towns; and thither also have migrated the labourers. Machinery and science applied to land cultivation lowered the amount of peasant labour required, but it did not lower the birth-rate. Surplus peasants have been driven by necessity from their homes to the centres of manufacturing industry, and, competing for work there with the operative class, have kept wages low and facilitated the enriching of capitalist employers. These men, actuated by personal desires, selfish ambition, and a tendency to mercantile speculation, use their wealth in extending the production of objects that minister to a life of luxury and refinement. The older political economists mistakenly taught that “all capital, with a trifling exception, was originally the result of saving.” (J. S. Mill’s _Political Economy_, book 1, chap. 5.) Attention to the history of social evolution, however, proves the fact to be otherwise. Not individual saving, but social seizure, created capital. Its origin, as we have shown, was the surplus produce taken from producers and disposed of by a dominant class. It originated through the selfish quality of rapacity and not through the respectable virtue of prudence, as some capitalists would have us believe. The growth of capital has been enormous since the beginning of the industrial revolution; and at the present moment the riches of a comparatively small number of the owners of our land and capital are colossal and increasing. At the same time, there is no diminution of poverty among workers. Thirty per cent. of the five million inhabitants of London are inadequately supplied with the bare necessaries of life, and about a fourth of the entire community become paupers at sixty-five. I refer my reader to Sidney Webb’s pamphlet, _The Difficulties of Individualism_.