permanent. The drain, once cut, remains a drain; and the limestone,
once reduced to lime, never again becomes limestone. It passes into
the food of man and animals, and ever after takes its part in the same
round with the clay with which it has been incorporated. The iron
rusts and gradually passes into soil, to take its part with the clay
and the lime. That portion of his labour gives him wages while
preparing the machine for greater future production. That other
portion which he expends on fashioning and exchanging _the products_
of the machine, produces temporary results and gives him wages alone.
Whatever tends to diminish the quantity of labour required for the
production of food tends to enable him to give more to the preparation
of machinery required for the fashioning and exchanging of the
products; and that machinery in its turn tends to augment the quantity
that may be given to increasing the amount of products, and to
preparing the great machine; and thus, while increasing the present
return to labour, preparing for a future further increase.

The first poor cultivator obtains a hundred bushels for his year's
wages. To pound this between two stones requires many days of labour,
and the work is not half done. Had he a mill in the neighbourhood he
would have better flour, and he would have almost the whole of those
days to bestow upon his land. He pulls up his grain. Had he a scythe,
he would have more time for the preparation of the machine of
production. He loses his axe, and it requires days of himself and his
horse on the road, to obtain another. His machine loses the time and
the manure, both of which would have been saved had the axe-maker been
at hand. The real advantage derived from the mill and the scythe, and
from the proximity of the axe-maker, consists simply in the power
which they afford him to devote his labour more and more to the
preparation of the great machine of production, and such is the case