d a certain sufficient
number, will be less and less profitably employed, while the indefinite
expansion of manufacture will permit every additional hand to be
utilized so as to increase the average product of each worker, would of
itself suffice to explain why in a fairly thickly populated country like
England, young labourers would find it to their interest to leave the
land and seek manufacturing work in the cities. This would of itself
explain why the country population might stand still while the city
grew. When to this natural tendency we add the influence of the vast
tracts of virgin, or cheaply cultivated soil, brought into active
competition with English agriculture by the railways and steamships
which link us with distant lands in America, Australia, and Asia, we
have a fully adequate explanation of the main force of the tide in the
movement of population. After a country has reached a certain stage in
the development of its resources, the commercial population must grow
more quickly than the agricultural, and the larger the outside area open
to supply agricultural imports the faster the change thus brought about
in the relation of city and rural population.

Sec. 4. Nature of the Decline of Rural Population.--It has been shown that
the absolute reduction in the number of those living in rural districts
is very small. If, however, we take the statistics of farmers and farm-
labourers in these same districts we often find a very considerable
decline. The real extent of the decline of agriculture is somewhat
concealed by the habit of including in the agricultural population a
good many people not engaged in work of agriculture. The number of
retail shopkeepers, railway men and others concerned with the transport
of goods, domestic servants, teachers, and others not directly occupied
in the production of material wealth, has considerably increased of late
years. So too, not every form of agriculture has declined. While farmers
and labourers show a decrease, market-gardeners show a large increase,
and there seem to be many more persons living in towns who cultivate a
bit of land in the country as a subsidiary employment.

Taken as a whole the absolute fall off in the number of those working
upon the soil is not large. The decline of small country industries is
much more considerable. Here another law of industrial motion comes in,
the rapid tendency of manufacture towards centralization in the towns,
which we hav