and hundreds of women that would otherwise be seeking to employ
themselves in binding shoes or making shirts. Competition for the
purchase of labour grows, therefore, with every increase in the
diversification of employment, with constant tendency to increase in
the reward of labour. It declines with every diminution in the modes
of employing labour, with steady tendency to decline in wages.

If the reader will now trace the course of man toward freedom, in the
various nations of the world, he will see that his progress has been
in the ratio of the growth of towns at which he and his neighbours
could exchange the products of their labour, and that it has declined
as the near towns have given way to the distant cities. The people of
Attica did not need to go abroad to effect their exchanges, and
therefore they became rich and free; whereas the Spartans, who
tolerated nothing but agriculture, remained poor and surrounded by
hosts of slaves. The towns and cities of Italy gave value to the land
by which they were surrounded, and freedom to the people by whom that
land was cultivated. So was it in Holland, and in Belgium, and so
again in England. In each and all of these land increased in value
with every increase in the facility of exchanging its products for
clothing and machinery, and with each step in this direction men were
enabled more readily to maintain and to increase the power of the
land, and to permit larger numbers to obtain increased supplies from
the same surfaces. Association thus increased the power of
accumulating wealth, and wealth thus diminished in its power over
labour, while with augmented numbers the people everywhere found an
increase in their power to assert and to defend their rights. Having
reflected on the facts presented to him in the pages of history, and
having satisfied himself that they are in perfect accordance with the
views here presented, the reader will perhaps find himself disposed to