may say the same of improvements in education. The intelligence of the workman is a most important element in the productiveness of labor. The carefulness, economy, and general trustworthiness of laborers are as important as their intelligence. Friendly relations and a community of interest and feeling between laborers and employers are eminently so. In the rich and idle classes, increased mental energy, more solid instruction, and stronger feelings of conscience, public spirit, or philanthropy, would qualify them to originate and promote the most valuable improvements, both in the economical resources of their country and in its institutions and customs.
§ 5. Law Holds True of Mining.
We must observe that what we have said of agriculture is true, with little variation, of the other occupations which it represents; of all the arts which extract materials from the globe. Mining industry, for example, usually yields an increase of produce at a more than proportional increase of expense.
It does worse, for even its customary annual produce requires to be extracted by a greater and greater expenditure of labor and capital. As a mine does not reproduce the coal or ore taken from it, not only are all mines at last exhausted, but even when they as yet show no signs of exhaustion they must be worked at a continually increasing cost; shafts must be sunk deeper, galleries driven farther, greater power applied to keep them clear of water; the produce must be [pg 144] lifted from a greater depth, or conveyed a greater distance. The law of diminishing return applies therefore to mining in a still more unqualified sense than to agriculture; but the antagonizing agency, that of improvements in production, also applies in a still greater degree. Mining operations are more susceptible of mechanical improvements than agricultural: the first great application of the steam-engine was to mining; and