our
hours through; the drums hum round, the shafts revolve perpetually,
and each revolution is a penny gained. It may be only steel-pen
making--pens, common pens, which one treats as of no value and
wastes by dozens; but the iron-man thumps them out hour after hour,
and the thin stream of daily profit swells into a noble river of
gold at the end of the year. Even the pill people are fortunate in
this: it is said that every second a person dies in this huge world
of ours. Certain it is that every second somebody takes a pill; and
so the millions of globules disappear, and so the profit is nearer 8
per cent. per hour than 8 per cent. per annum. But this idle earth
takes a third of the year to mature its one single crop of pills;
and so the agriculturist with his slow returns cannot compete with
the quick returns of the tradesman and manufacturer. If he cannot
compete, he cannot long exist; such is the modern law of business.
As an illustration, take one large meadow on a dairy farm; trace its
history for one year, and see what an idle workshop this meadow is.
Call it twenty acres of first-class land at L2 15s. per acre, or L55
per annum. Remember that twenty acres is a large piece on which
some millions multiplied by millions of cubic feet of air play on a
month, and on which an incalculable amount of force in the shape of
sunlight is poured down in the summer. January sees this plot of a
dull, dirty green, unless hidden by snow; the dirty green is a
short, juiceless herbage. The ground is as hard as a brick with the
frost. We will not stay now to criticize the plan of carting out
manure at this period, or dwell on the great useless furrows. Look
carefully round the horizon of the twenty acres, and there is not an
animal in sight, not a single machine for making money, not a penny
being turned. The cows are all in the stalls. February comes, March
passes; the herbage grows slowly; but still no machines are
introduced, no pennies roll out at the gateways. The farmer may lean
on the gate and gaze over an empty workshop, twenty acres big, with
his hands in his pockets, except when he pulls out his purse to pay
the hedge-cutters who are clearing out the ditches, the women who
have been stone-picking, and the carters who took out the manure,
half of which stains the drains, while the volatile part mixes with
the atmosphere. This is highly profitable and gratifying. The man
walks home, hears his daughter playing the piano, pick