The increased expense of raising food enhances its price: labour, both agricultural and manufacturing, becomes dearer (without advantage to the labourer): this rise of wages causes profits to fall; and this fall brings after it a reduction of the labourer’s share, or a fall of wages. The fall of profits and wages is thus referable to the same cause which raises rent;—to an inequality in the fertility of soils. -------------- Thus it appears that, owing to the inequality of soils, and the principle of increase in the number of consumers, the natural tendency of rent is to rise; and to rise in proportion to the increase in the number of consumers. The tendency of profits is to fall as rent rises, _i. e._ as the production of food becomes more expensive. The fall of profits brings after it, as a necessary consequence, the fall of wages; and the individual shares of wages are still further reduced by every increase of the numbers among whom the wages’ fund is to be divided. These are important truths, and by no means discouraging, if we know how to make use of them. There is no need hastily to suppose that our landowners must inevitably get all the wealth of society into their own hands, so that there will in time be only two classes in the state,—landowners and paupers. It is possible that this might happen, as it is possible that we may all die of famine from nobody choosing to be at the trouble of tilling the ground. The two cases are possible, and the catastrophes about equally probable. No one can deny the strong tendency to famine to which we are all liable unless we exert ourselves to avoid it; and the undue rise of rent, and fall of profits and wages, is quite as certainly avoided by moderate caution—by bringing natural laws to bear upon each other, and not (as some desire) a law of human will to control that which is beyond the reach of the unassisted human will.