village grocer deals not only in groceries, but in dry-goods, crockery, hardware, books, and stationery; and if a Yankee, he may also edit, print, and publish a newspaper, keep a school, and go to Congress. In large cities, the sale of a single article of grocery may form a large and lucrative business: in Boston and New York, there are shops where nothing is sold but tea. All improvements in the modes of transportation, as by roads, canals, and railways, obviously promote the Division of Labor, by widening the market which each locality can command for its special products.

"The Division of Labor is also limited, in many cases," says Mr. Mill, "by the nature of the employment. Agriculture, for example, is not susceptible of so great a division of occupations as many branches of manufactures, because its different occupations cannot possibly be simultaneous. One man cannot be always ploughing, another sowing, and another reaping. A workman who only practised one agricultural operation would be idle eleven months of the year. The same person may perform them all in succession, and have, in almost every climate, a considerable amount of unoccupied time. The combination of labor of which agricultural industry is susceptible is chiefly that which Mr. Wakefield calls Simple Co-operation, many persons employed together in the same work. To execute a great agricultural improvement, it is often necessary that many laborers should work together; but in general, except the few whose business is superintendence, they all work in the same manner. A canal or a railway embankment cannot be made without a combination of many laborers; but they are all excavators, except the engineer and a few clerks."

a

The advantages of the Division of Labor, however, we must admit, are subject to one serious drawback. Few things tend so effectually to dwarf the mind and stunt the faculties as the incessant and long-continued repetition of a very simple task, mechanical movement, which is repeated with as little effort of thought as if it were performed by a machine. Even Adam Smith remarks, that constant application to such a task “ necessarily renders the workmen as stupid and ignorant as it is possible to make a human being." And Say adds, that " a man whose whole life is devoted to the execution of a single operation

will most assuredly acquire the faculty of executing it better and quicker than others; but he will, at the same time, be rendered less fit for every other occupation, bodily and intellectual; his other faculties will be gradually blunted and extinguished, and the man, as an individual, will degenerate in consequence. To have never done anything but make the eighteenth part of a pin is a sorry account for a human being to give of his existence." The division even of intellectual labor, however it may tend to excellence, and insure success, in a single department, is not without a similar pernicious result. The successful pursuit of a single art, or of the fraction of a single science, is but poor compensation for the loss of all versatility and alertness of mind, and for allowing most of the faculties to rust by disuse. One may become a good accountant, an expert mathematician, even a skilful lawyer, without being anything more than the fraction of

a man.

"The difference of natural talents in different men," says Adam Smith, "is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not, upon many occasions, so much the cause, as the effect, of the Division of Labor. The difference between the most dissimilar characters - between a philosopher and a common street-porter, for example seems to arise, not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were very much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to be employed in very different occupations. The difference of talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till, at last, the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. But without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties to perform, and the same work to do; and there could have been no such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to any great difference of talents.”

"As it is this disposition which forms that difference of talents so remarkable among men of different professions, so it is this

Many

same disposition which renders that difference useful. tribes of animals, acknowledged to be all of the same species, derive from nature a much more remarkable distinction of genius, than what, antecedent to custom and education, appears to take place among men. By nature, a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street-porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound from a spaniel, or this last from a a shepherd's dog. Those different tribes of animals, however, though all of the same species, are of scarce any use to one another. The strength of the mastiff is not in the least supported either by the swiftness of the greyhound, or by the sagacity of the spaniel, or by the docility of the shepherd's dog. The effects of those different geniuses and talents, for want of the power or disposition to barter and exchange, cannot be brought into a common stock, and do not in the least contribute to the better accommodation and conveniency of the species. Each animal is still obliged to support and defend itself, separately and independently, and derives no sort of advantage from that variety of talents with which nature has distinguished its fellows. Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another; the different products of their respective talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, being brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men's talents he has occasion for."

The superior efficiency and productiveness of industry at the present day, as compared with the industry of former times, is due not only to the Division of Labor, but to the use of better tools and implements, and to the invention of improved machines and cheaper processes of manufacture. Perhaps the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has been the rapid progress of invention, and the consequent multiplication and cheapening of all the material products that satisfy human wants. These improvements consist in economizing man's time and industry, either by causing natural agencies, such as steam, electricity, magnetism, or heat, to do the work, or by making a happier application and more frugal use of the powers already employed. "One of the most striking qualities of machinery," says Mr. Senior, "is its susceptibility of indefinite improvement." In the manufacture of iron and

steel, and the application of them to a vast number of new purposes; in the transportation of men and goods, and the transmission of intelligence; in the use of new materials, such as caoutchouc, gutta-percha, gas, and petroleum; in the work of a great printingoffice, like that of The Times newspaper; and even in the implements and processes of agriculture now in use, so much has been accomplished, that we may safely say the amount of possible enjoyment has been quadrupled, and one man now often does what would have been the work of a thousand only fifty years ago. Often the immediate consequence of introducing an improved process, or a new machine, is so to economize human labor that many workmen are thrown out of employment, and wages are, for a while, considerably depressed. In most cases, however, the ultimate result is, through cheapening the price, so far to increase the demand for the products, that more persons than ever are employed in their formation, and wages rise again. Railroads have, in a great degree, created the travel and the traffic which they so much facilitate and cheapen, and thus give employment to laborers greatly exceeding in number the stage-drivers and wagoners whose occupations were superseded by them. The invention of printing deprived many copyists of work and wages, but has so multiplied books and newspapers, that there are now probably more persons employed in making books, than there were, in the fifteenth century, in reading them. Generally speaking, the progress of invention has enlarged, rather than contracted, the field for the employment of industry.

But I doubt whether it has been so in every instance. The demand for an article is sometimes limited by natural causes, irrespective of its dearness or cheapness; and in such case, any improvement which will diminish the labor required for its production must permanently deprive some laborers of employment. Thus, the demand for bread must be limited by the size of the population, that is, by the number of mouths to be fed: cheapen its production ever so much, and very little more will be called for. Hence, it may be feared, the use of the steam-engine in many kinds of farm-work, and the recent invention of so many sowing, reaping, mowing, and threshing machines, have permanently diminished the number of agricultural laborers, and thereby lowered the rates of wages everywhere, even in manufactures.

This is one of the causes others will be pointed out hereafter why the number of persons engaged in agriculture in Great Britain is constantly becoming less, so that a process of depopulating the rural districts seems to be going on, at the same time that pauperism is increasing, and the multitudes who take refuge in the cities and manufacturing towns find little employment there and scant wages. Through the extended use of such machinery, indeed, a great farm comes to resemble a huge manufactory, in which steam furnishes the whole motive power, and the number of human beings employed is small out of all proportion to the quantity of work done. This result is a triumph of inventive skill and money-making ingenuity; but it is a matter of evil omen for the classes who are entirely dependent upon the wages of labor. The recent invention of the sewing-machine has taken away work and wages from many seamstresses, journeymen tailors, and shoemakers; and I doubt whether it has increased, in anything like the same degree, the demand for clothes, boots and shoes, and other sewed fabrics; since this demand must be regulated by the number of people who need to be clothed and shod. The construction of machinery, of railroads and canals, and of .great works of irrigation, as in India, not only lessens the demand for manual labor, but takes away from the power of paying wages for it, through converting large amounts of Circulating Capital into Fixed Capital.

CHAPTER IV.

THE NATURE OF CAPITAL, AND THE MEANS OF ITS INCREASE: CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH FAVOR THE GROWTH OF CAPITAL: THE SECURITY OF PROPERTY.

ANOTHER circumstance on which the efficiency of labor largely depends is the co-operation of capital, or stock. All capital is wealth, but all wealth is not capital. The furniture of a rich man's house, for instance, his carpets, his plate, his paintings, and much even of the food which is daily placed upon his table, forms a portion of his wealth, but not of his capital. All these articles contribute to his enjoyment; perhaps some of them are