continual interruption. Smiths, carpenters, wheelwrights and
ploughwrights, masons and bricklayers, tanners, shoemakers, and
tailors, are people whose service the farmer has frequent occasion
for. Such artificers, too, stand occasionally in need of the
assistance of one another; and as their residence is not, like that
of the farmer, necessarily tied down to a precise spot, they
naturally settle in the neighbourhood of one another, and thus form a
small town or village. The butcher, the brewer, and the baker soon
join them, together with many other artificers and retailers,
necessary or useful for supplying their occasional wants, and who
contribute still further to augment the town. The inhabitants of the
town and those of the country are mutually the servants of one
another. The town is a continual fair or market, to which the
inhabitants of the country resort, in order to exchange their rude
for manufactured produce. It is this commerce which supplies the
inhabitants of the town, both with the materials of their work and
the means of their subsistence. The quantity of the finished work
which they sell to the inhabitants of the country, necessarily
regulates the quantity of the materials and provisions which they
buy. Neither their employment nor subsistence, therefore, can
augment, but in proportion to the augmentation of the demand from the
country for finished work; and this demand can augment only in
proportion to the extension of improvement and cultivation. Had human
institutions, therefore, never disturbed the natural course of
things, the progressive wealth and increase of the towns would, in
every political society, be consequential, and in proportion to the
improvement and cultivation of the territory or country."

The demand on the artisan "can augment only in proportion to the
extension of improvement and cultivation." Nothing can be more true.