anticipated a vast market for our manufacturing industry, and an ample
compensation for the diminution of our shipping interest.
Nature has established this great and all-important distinction between
the effects of wealth and national age on the productions of agriculture
and of manufactures. The reason is this:--If capital, machinery, and
knowledge, conferred the same immediate and decisive advantage on
agricultural that they do on manufacturing industry, old and
densely-peopled states would possess an undue superiority over the ruder
and more thinly-inhabited ones; the multiplication of the human race would
become excessive in the seats in which it had first taken root, and the
desert parts of the world would never, but under the pressure of absolute
necessity, be explored. The first command of God to man, "Be fruitful, and
multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it," would be frustrated.
The apprehensions of the Malthusians as to an excessive increase of
mankind, with its attendant dangers, would be realized in particular
places, while nineteen-twentieths of the earth lay neglected in a state of
nature. The desert would be left alone in its glory. The world would be
covered with huge and densely-peopled excrescences--with Babylons, Romes,
and Londons--in which wealth, power, and corruption were securely and
permanently intrenched, and from which the human race would ne'er diverge
but under the pressure of absolute impossibility to wrench a subsistence
from their over-peopled vicinities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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