[25] According to Eden it was about _seventeen hundred million pounds_ at the beginning of the present century. Twenty-five years previously it was, according to Young’s estimate, _eleven hundred million pounds_. [26] I have not mentioned Profits. They consist, says Mill, of Interest on Capital and Wages of Superintendence; to which he adds compensation for risk—a most important item, but not requiring to be included here. [27] From 1716 to 1770 the cotton manufactured in this country annually averaged under _two and a half million pounds_ weight. From 1771 to 1775 it was _four million seven hundred thousand pounds_. From 1781 to 1785 it was _eleven million pounds_. From 1791 to 1795 it was _twenty-six million pounds_; and from 1795 to 1800 it was _thirty-seven million pounds_. [28] Pitt estimated that the hands employed in spinning increased from forty thousand to eighty thousand between the years 1760 and 1790. [29] Were any confirmation of this conclusion needed, it is afforded us by the fact that in 1786 a spinner received _ten shillings_ a pound for spinning cotton of a certain quality: in 1795 he had received only _eightpence_, or a fifteenth part of ten shillings; and yet in the course of a similar day’s labour, he made more money than he had been able to do under the former scale of payment. The price of spinning No. 100 was _ten shillings_ per pound in 1786; in 1793, _two shillings and sixpence_. The subsequent drop to _eightpence_ coincided with the application of machinery to the working of the mule. [30] Were this work a treatise on political economy, rather than a work on practical politics, in which only the simplest and most fundamental economic principles are insisted on, I should have here introduced a chapter on the special and peculiar part which fixed capital, other than machinery, plays in agriculture. I have not done so, however, for fear of interrupting the thread of the main argument; but it will be useful to call the reader’s attention to the subject in a note. It was explained in the last chapter that rent (to speak with strict accuracy) is not to be described as the product of superior soils, but rather as the product of the qualities which make such soils superior—qualities which are present in them and which in poorer soils are absent. Now in speaking of rent, we assumed these superior qualities to be natural. As a matter of fact, however, in highly cultivated countries, many of them are artificial. They have been added to the soil by human exertion—for instance by the process of draining; or they have been actually placed in the soil, as by the process of manuring. In this way land and capital merge and melt into one another, and illustrate each other’s functions as productive agents. It is impossible to imagine a more complete and beautiful example of the relation between the two. At this point the rent of Capital and the rent of Land become indistinguishable.