with all the machinery of conversion and exchange. The plough enables
him to do as much in one day as with a spade he could do in five. He
saves four days for drainage. The steam-engine drains as much as,
without it, could be drained by thousands of days of labour. He has
more leisure to marl or lime his land. The more he can extract from
his property the greater is its value, because every thing he takes
is, by the very act of taking it, fashioned to aid further production.
The machine, therefore, improves by use, whereas spades, and ploughs,
and steam-engines, and all other of the instruments used by man, are
but the various forms into which he fashions parts of the great
original machine, to disappear in the act of being used; as much so as
food, though not so rapidly. The earth is the great labour-savings'
bank, and the value to man of all other machines is in the direct
ratio of their tendency to aid him in increasing his deposites in that
only bank whose dividends are perpetually increasing, while its
capital is perpetually doubling. That it may continue for ever so to
do, all that it asks is that it shall receive back the refuse of its
produce, the manure; and that it may do so, the consumer and the
producer must take their places by each other. That done, every change
that is effected becomes permanent, and tends to facilitate other and
greater changes. The whole business of the farmer consists in making
and improving soils, and the earth rewards him for his kindness by
giving him more and more food the more attention he bestows upon her.
All that he receives from her must be regarded as a loan, and when he
fails to pay his debts, she starves him out.

The absolute necessity for returning to the land the manure yielded by
its products is so generally admitted that it would appear scarcely
necessary to do more than state the fact; for every land-owner knows
that when he grants the lease of a farm, one of the conditions he