Up to about 1900 a unit of labor applied to industry yielded year by year a purchasing power over an increasing quantity of food.

It is possible that about the year 1900 this process began to be reversed, and a diminishing yield of Nature to man's effort was beginning to reassert itself.

But the tendency of cereals to rise in real cost was balanced by other improvements; and--one of many novelties--the resources of tropical Africa then for the first time came into large employ, and a great traffic in oil-seeds began to bring to the table of Europe in a new and cheaper form one of the essential foodstuffs of mankind.

In this economic Eldorado, in this economic Utopia, as the earlier economists would have deemed it, most of us were brought up.
That happy age lost sight of a view of the world which filled with deep-seated melancholy the founders of our Political Economy.

Before the eighteenth century mankind entertained no false hopes.