=A Peculiarity of Agricultural Production—The Law of Diminishing Returns.=—There is one fundamental feature in which agriculture differs from industry. In industry, as a rule, the more labor and capital you apply the greater the amount of the produce. Many industries, indeed, are so constituted that by applying additional capital and labor you obtain more than proportionate returns. Take the book-binding industry, for example. A small shop, employing three men, might bind and stamp two hundred books per day at a cost of twenty cents per book. But a large establishment, employing a hundred workers with modern machinery can easily put through many thousand books at half the cost per volume. A manufacturer, if he is wise, finds out what branches of his business are most profitable. Then he applies more capital and labor in that direction so as to increase his earnings, and devotes less attention to the things which cannot be made so profitably. This is known as production under the _law of increasing returns_. But in agriculture the situation is quite different. Any farmer or ranchman will tell you, if you ask him, that some of his land is better than the rest and yields him greater profit for the capital and labor applied to it. But if you thereupon suggest to him that he should devote all his attention to this particular piece of land, and neglect the rest, he would think very poorly of your intelligence. [Sidenote: An illustration of _decreasing returns_.] And rightly so, for if he applied more labor and capital to his best land, he would not be sure of getting a crop-increase in proportion; on the contrary, he would be quite safe in saying that, after a certain point, his extra labor and capital would bring him _less_ than proportionate returns. An investment of ten dollars per acre may result in a crop of fifteen bushels per acre. It is very doubtful whether by applying twenty dollars worth of capital and labor to the land this yield could be doubled and it is quite certain that it could not be trebled by spending thirty dollars per acre on the land. In other words, agriculture is carried on, for the most part, under the _law of diminishing returns_, which may be briefly defined by saying that, “if at any given time, the amount of labor and capital applied to agricultural land is increased beyond a certain point, the increased investment will yield less than proportionate returns”. If this were not the case, no one would ever cultivate the poorer lands. We would raise our entire crops from the most fertile tracts. The point at which the returns will begin to diminish can never be exactly fixed, for improvements in the methods of agriculture may place it further ahead. These improved methods also bring into cultivation lands which otherwise would not be utilized.