to the preparation of the great food-making machine, and with each
year the returns are larger. His _power to command_ the use of the
machinery of exchange increases, but his _necessity_ therefor
diminishes, for with each there is an increasing tendency toward
having the consumer placed side by side with the producer, and with
each he can devote more and more of his time and mind to the business
of fashioning the great machine to which he is indebted for food and
clothing; and thus the increase of a consuming population is essential
to the progress of production.

Diversification of employments, resulting from combination of action,
thus enables men to economize labour and to increase production.
Increased production, on the other hand, makes a demand for labour.
The more wheat raised and the more cloth made, the more there will be
to give in exchange for labour, the greater will be the number of
persons seeking for labourers, and the greater will be the power of
men to determine for themselves the mode in which they will employ
their time or their talents. If, therefore, we desire to see men
advance in freedom, we must endeavour to increase the productive
power; and that, as we see, grows with the growth of the power to
improve the land, while it diminishes with every diminution in the
power to return to the land the manure yielded by its products. In
purely agricultural countries there is little demand for labour, and
it always tends to diminish, as may be proved by any reader of this
volume who may chance to occupy a purely agricultural neighbourhood.
Let him look around him, and he will, without difficulty, find
hundreds of men, and hundreds of women and children, wasting more time
than would, if properly employed, purchase twice the clothing and
twice the machinery of production they are now enabled to obtain. Why,
however, he will probably ask, is it that they do so waste it? Because