◆¹ My present aim, however, is to make no exact calculation respecting the extent to which production, taken as a whole, had during the period in question outstripped the increase of Labour; but merely to show the reader that the extent was very large; and that, according to the principles explained already, it was due altogether to the operation of Capital and Ability—or, to speak more exactly, of Ability operating through Capital. The truth of this statement with regard to the increase of manufactures has been shown and illustrated by the instance of Arkwright and the cotton industry. It will be well to mention at this point several analogous instances taken from the history of agriculture. ◆² Elkington, who inaugurated a new system of drainage, will supply us with one. One still more remarkable is supplied by Bakewell, who may be said to have played in practical life a part resembling that which Darwin has played in speculation. He discovered the method of improving the breeds of sheep and cattle by a system of selection and crossing that was not before known; and it was owing to the ability of this one man that “the breed of animals in England,” as Mr. Lecky points out, “was probably more improved in the course of a single fifty years than in all the recorded centuries that preceded it.” The close connection of such improvements with Capital is the constant theme of Arthur Young, though he was not consciously anything of a political economist, nor did he attempt to express his opinion in scientific language. But a still more effective witness is a distinguished modern Radical, Professor Thorold Rogers, who, though always ready, and, as many people would say, eager to espouse the side of Labour as against Capital and Ability,—especially when the two last belonged to the landed class—is yet compelled to assert as emphatically as Young himself, that the Ability and the Capital of this very class were in the last century “the pioneers of agricultural progress”—a progress which he illustrates by these picturesque examples: that it raised the average weight of the fatted ox from 400 lbs. to 1200 lbs., and increased the weight of the average fleece fourfold. [Sidenote ◆1 Therefore it is plain that Labour would not have created the whole of the national income a hundred years ago. But for argument’s sake we will concede that it produced the whole.]