as measured by the difference in the productivity of the
land under consideration and that of the poorest land under
cultivation at the time; and therefore being in its amount independent
of direct human control. The Malthusian law of population showed that
population tended to increase in a geometrical ratio, subsistence for
the population, on the other hand, only in an arithmetical ratio, and
that poverty was, therefore, the natural and inevitable result in old
countries of a pressure of population on subsistence. The sanction of
science was thus given alike to the desires of the lovers of freedom
and to the regrets of those who deplored man's departure from the
state of nature.

All these intellectual tendencies and reasonings of the later
eighteenth century, therefore, combined to discredit the minute
regulation of economic society, which had been the traditional policy
of the immediately preceding centuries. The movement of thought was
definitely opposed to the continuance or extension of the supervision
of the government over matters of labor, wages, hours, industry,
commerce, agriculture, or other phenomena of production, distribution,
exchange, or consumption. This set of opinions is known as the
_laissez-faire_ theory of the functions of government, the view that
the duties of government should be reduced to the smallest possible
number, and that it should keep out of the economic sphere altogether.
Adam Smith would have restricted the functions of government to three:
to protect the nation from the attacks of other nations, to protect
each person in the nation from the injustice or violence of other
individuals, and to carry on certain educational or similar
institutions which were of general utility, but not to any one's
private interest. Many of his successors would have cut off the last
duty altogether.

*62. Cessation of Government Regulation*--These theoretical opinions
came to be more and more widely held, more and more influential over
the most thoughtful of English statesmen and other men of prominence,
until within the first half of the nineteenth century it may be said
that their acceptance was general and their influence dominant. They
fell in with the actual tendencies of the times, and as a result of
the natural breaking down of old conditions, the rise of new, and the
general acceptance of this attitude of _laissez-faire_, a rapid and
general decay of the system of government regulation took