And what is true in this respect of production and progress in agriculture is equally true of production and progress generally. The former indeed are the simplest type of the latter, just as they are {203} their original basis; and before we proceed farther, there is one fact more in connection with them on which it is necessary for the purposes of our present argument to insist. Of soils the same as to area, but not the same as to quality, some, it has been said, will produce ten loaves, some fifteen, some twenty; and soils may exist, perhaps, which would produce only five. But in order that any soil may be cultivated by human labour, it is necessary that the product should be at least sufficient to keep the men alive who devote their labour to cultivating it. No set of men, unless artificially subsidised, could continue to cultivate any region if the product of twelve months’ labour would support them for only three months. It follows, therefore, from this truism that no soils can be cultivated which will not yield to labour a certain minimum product. Now, though this minimum is, in a certain sense, the product of labour and of land jointly, for all purposes of practical reasoning it is the product of labour alone. It is so because the sole object of practical reasoning about the matter is to determine the principles on which the product of the land is to be distributed; and with regard to that minimum there can be no doubt or question. It must go to the labourer, and it can go to no one else. The landlord, if there be one, cannot take any part of it; for if he did, the labourer would die, and there would cease to be any product to take. Labour, then, in agriculture must be held for all practical purposes to produce the whole of that minimum {204} resulting from its application to the least productive soils which the labourer can live by cultivating; and it is only in the case of soils which are more productive than these, and which yield to similar labour a product above this minimum, that land, apart from labour, can be said practically to produce anything at all.