XI. That, the greater the quantity of raw produce seeking to pass through the market of England, the greater must be the tendency to a decline in the value of English land, and the larger the charges of the owners of the mills, ships, and shops, through which the produce must pass, and the greater their power of accumulation, at the cost of both labour and land. XII. That the less the labour applied to the improvement of the soil, the more must the population of the country be driven from off the land, the greater must be the tendency of the latter toward consolidation, and the greater the tendency toward absenteeism and the substitution of great farmers and day-labourers for small proprietors, with further decline in production and in the demand for labour. XIII. That with the reduction of the country population, local places of exchange must pass away; and that labour and land must decline in power as ships, mills, and their owners become more united and more powerful. XIV. That the tendency of the whole system is, therefore, toward diminishing the value and the power of land, and toward rendering the labourer a mere slave to the trading community, which obtains from day to day more and more the power to impose taxes at its pleasure, and to centralize in its own hands the direction of the affairs of the nation; to the destruction of local self-government, and to the deterioration of the physical, moral, intellectual, and political condition of the people. In accordance with these views, an examination of the productive power of the United Kingdom should result in showing that production has not kept pace with population; and that such had been the ease we should be disposed to infer from the increasing demand for cheap labour, and from the decline that has unquestionably taken place in the control of the labourer over his own operations. That the facts are in accordance with this inference the reader may perhaps be disposed to admit after having examined carefully the following figures. In 1815, now thirty-eight years since, the declared value of the exports of the United Kingdom, of British produce and manufacture, was as follows:-- Of woollen manufactures............... £9,381,426 " cotton " ............... 20,620,000 " silk " ............... 622,118 " linen " ............... 1,777,563 And of other commodities.............. 19,231,684 ---------- Total................................. 51,632,791 In the same year there were imported of