It would seem to be a fixed law of nature, that the progress of society adds almost nothing to the application of machinery to agriculture, but indefinitely to its importance in manufactures.  Observe an old man digging his garden with a spade—­that is the most productive species of cultivation; it is the last stage of agricultural progress to return to it.  No steam engines or steam ploughs will ever rival it.  But what is the old weaver toiling with his hands, to the large steam-power mill, turning at once ten thousand spindles?  As dust in the balance.  Man, by a beneficent law of his Maker, is permanently secured in his first and best pursuit.  It is in those which demoralize and degrade, that machinery progressively encroaches on the labour of his hands.  England can undersell India in muslins and printed goods, manufactured in Lancashire or Lanarkshire, out of cotton which grew on the banks of the Ganges; for England though younger in years compared to India, is old in civilization, wealth, and power.  We should like to see what profit would be made by exporting wheat from England, raised on land paying thirty shillings an acre of rent, by labourers paid at two shillings a-day, to Hindostan, where rice is raised twice a-year, on land paying five shillings an acre rent, by labourers receiving twopence a-day each.

It is the constant operation of this law of nature which ensures the equalization of empires, the happiness of society, and the dispersion of mankind.  To be convinced of this, we have only to reflect on the results which would ensue if this were not the case; if no unvarying law gave man in remote situations an advantage in raising subsistence over what they enjoy in the centres of opulence; and agriculture, in the aged and wealthy community, was able to acquire the same decisive superiority over distant and comparatively poor ones, which we see daily examplified in the production of manufactures.  Suppose, for example, that in consequence of the application of the steam-engine, capital, and machinery to the raising of subsistence, Great Britian could undersell the cultivatiors of Poland and the Ukraine as effectually as she does their manufacturers in the production of cotton goods; that she could sell in the Polish market wheat at five shillings a quarter, when they require fifteen shillings to remunerate the cost of production.  Would not the result be, that commerce between them would be entirely destroyed; that subsistence would be exclusively raised in the old opulent community; that mankind would congregate in fearful multitudes round the great commercial emporium of the world; and that the industry and progress of the more distant nations would be irrevocably blighted?  Whereas, by the operation of the present law of nature, that the rich state can always undersell the poor one in maufactures, and the poor one always undersell the rich one in subsistence, those dangers are removed, a check is provided to the undue multiplication of the species in particular situations, and the dispersion of mankind over the globe—­a vital object in the system of nature—­is secured, from the very necessities and difficulties in which, in the progress of society, the old and wealthy community becomes involved.