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130 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIES
a very late date cotton was king; more lately, since
the beginning of the railway and steamship era, it has
been coal and iron. How do we know, how can we
know, that coal and iron are to reign indefinitely, any
more than wool, or the woollen manufacture, or cotton
themselves have done? Changes are always going on,
and for that reason I believe we should attach the
more importance to the increasing signs that it is no
longer necessary or indispensable for prosperous com-
munities to live where their food and raw materials
are grown-that there may be advantages of climate,
of accumulated wealth, of acquired skill, of concentra-
tion of population which are now, under the new con-
ditions, overwhelmingly more important. It would be
absurd to dogmatize in such a matter. I hope, how-
ever, I have said enough to those who care to reflect
to satisfy them that the indispensability even of coal
and iron to the continuance of our material growth is
no longer to be assumed, that there are wholly new
conditions to be considered.
To come back to the practical point in all this dis-
cussion. Not only is there no sign in anything that
has yet happened that the apparent check to our former
rate of material growth is due to the loss of natural
advantages which we once possessed, but the theory
of natural advantages itself requires to be revised.
Equally in this way as in the other ways that have been
discussed, it is impossible to account for the apparent
check to the former rate of our material growth which
has been observed.

III.
Having carried matters so far, however, and having
found the insufficiency of the various causes which
have been assigned for the check to our former rate of
material growth, because they have not produced the sort
of effect in detail which they ought to have produced so
as to lead to the general effect alleged, or because they
existed quite as much when the rate of growth was