8 THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE ch.

goods which were to maintain the emigrant popula-tions in their new homes, and to build the rail-ways and ships which were to make accessible toEurope food and raw products from distant sources.Up to about 1900 a unit of labour applied toindustry yielded year by year a purchasing powerover an increasing quantity of food. It is possiblethat about the year 1900 this process began to bereversed, and a diminishing yield of Nature to man'seffort was beginning to reassert itself. But the tend-ency of cereals to rise in real cost was balanced byother improvements ; and—one of many novelties—■the resources of tropical Africa then for the first timecame into large employ, and a great traffic in oil-seeds began to bring to the table of Europe in anew and cheaper form one of the essential foodstuffsof mankind. In this economic Eldorado, in thiseconomic Utopia, as the earlier economists wouldhave deemed it, most of us were brought up.

That happy age lost sight of a view of the worldwhich filled with deep-seated melancholy the foundersof our Political Economy. Before the eighteenthcentury mankind entertained no false hopes. Tolay the illusions which grew popular at that age'slatter end, Malthus disclosed a Devil . For half acentury all serious economical writings held thatDevil in clear prospect. For the next half centuryhe was chained up and out of sight. Now perhapswe have loosed him again.