winter's use. The path becomes a road. Exchanges increase. The store
makes its appearance. Labour is rewarded by larger returns, because
aided by better machinery applied to better soils. The town grows up.
Each successive addition to the population brings a consumer and a
producer. The shoemaker desires leather and corn in exchange for his
shoes. The blacksmith requires fuel and food, and the farmer wants
shoes for his horses; and with the increasing facility of exchange
more labour is applied to production, and the reward of labour rises,
producing new desires, and requiring more and larger exchanges. The
road becomes a turnpike, and the wagon and horses are seen upon it.
The town becomes a city, and better soils are cultivated for the
supply of its markets, while the railroad facilitates exchanges with
towns and cities yet more distant. The tendency to union and to
combination of exertion thus grows with the growth of wealth. In a
state of extreme poverty it cannot be developed. The insignificant
tribe of savages that starves on the product of the superficial soil
of hundreds of thousands of acres of land, looks with jealous eye on
every intruder, knowing that each new mouth requiring to be fed tends
to increase the difficulty of obtaining subsistence; whereas the
farmer rejoices in the arrival of the blacksmith and the shoemaker,
because they come to eat on the spot the corn which heretofore he has
carried ten, twenty, or thirty miles to market, to exchange for shoes
for himself and his horses. With each new consumer of his products
that arrives he is enabled more and more to concentrate his action and
his thoughts upon his home, while each new arrival tends to increase
his _power_ of consuming commodities brought from a distance, because
it tends to diminish his _necessity_ for seeking at a distance a
market for the produce of his farm. Give to the poor tribe spades, and
the knowledge how to use them, and the power of association will
begin. The supply of food becoming more abundant, they hail the