of outlay—always assuming that the skill employed in applying it continues the same as before—will be attended with a return constantly diminishing.... What I am now concerned to show is the manner in which, with the progress of society, the law in question affects the course of normal297 values in all commodities coming under its influence.
“The class of commodities in the production of which the facilities possessed by new communities, as compared with old, attain their greatest height, are those of which timber and meat may be taken as the type, and comprises such articles as wool, game, furs, hides, horns, pitch, resin, etc. The circumstance which most powerfully affects the course of values in the products of extractive industry, and in the commodities just referred to among the rest, is the degree in which they admit of being transported from place to place—that is to say, their portableness—depending, as it does, partly on their durability and partly on their bulk.” It is found that, taking timber and meat as a type—one possessing portableness in a vastly greater degree than the other—in the early settlement of a new country, the portable article, like timber, at once rises in price “to a level lower than that prevailing in old countries only by the cost of transport”; on the other hand, perishable articles like meat are “confined for a market, if not to the immediate [pg 482] locality where it is produced, at least to the bordering countries; and, being raised in new countries at very low cost, their value during the early stages of their growth is necessarily low. But, as population advances, and agriculture encroaches on the natural pasture-lands originally available for the rearing of cattle, still more as it becomes necessary to cultivate land for the purpose of pasture, the cost of meat constantly rises.” As