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after they have brought to it tolerable tools? Is it not because he had found it impossible to account for the possession of tolerable tools, under the law, and was therefore compelled to postpone the period of its taking effect, until after this difficulty had been surmounted, and the first indispensable infraction of the law taken place?

However convenient, indeed essential, this limitation may be, to make the supposed law capable of holding its place in a system of Political Economy, we apprehend it must remove the law from the canon of Nature. Her enactments are from everlasting, and have never been held in abeyance for a moment, except by the miraculous interposition of their divine author. The notion that they have been suspended from time to time among the various tribes of men, to give them an opportunity of furbishing up some tolerable tools, might not surprise us in a worshipper of Mumbo Jumbo, on the Guinea Coast, but can scarcely have presented itself in the full distinctness of its absurdity to the mind of a philosopher and a Christian.

Mr. Mill continues: "This general law of agricultural industry is the most important proposition in Political Economy. Were the law different, nearly all the phenomena of the production and distribution of wealth would be other than they are."

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In reference to the importance of the proposition, we concur with him heartily. The disagreement in relation to its truth, and the consequences resulting therefrom, makes the whole difference sufficiently wide one-between the American system, the final issue of which, made axiomatic by the native sense of the people, is rendered in the national aphorism, "population is wealth," and the Economical system of the Old World. We have, as we think, sufficiently proved that the proposition of the Ricardo school finds no foundation in the inherent properties of land. Whether there is anything to uphold it in the laws affecting human labour, we shall now proceed to inquire. The proposition must either find its support in the latter, or it is baseless as a dream.

CO-OPERATION OF NATURAL AGENTS WITH HUMAN LABOUR. 63

CHAPTER III.

THE GRATUITOUS CO-OPERATION OF THE NATURAL AGENTS WITH HUMAN LABOUR.

MAN has been defined a tool-making animal. We nowhere see him working without artificial aid. Even the rudest savages possess some simple implements, which they employ in fishing and hunting, in fabricating their raiment and building their huts. It is difficult, indeed, to conceive man as destitute of every kind of implements. But to arrive at the laws regulating human labour the contraction of muscular fibre

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as an instrument of production, it is obviously necessary to inquire into its power and action, abstracted from all the other instruments and appliances which habitually concur with it in the execution of work. We can arrive at the laws of the combined action of two forces, only by first understanding those which control their separate action.

We see that, in point of fact, men in every civilized society perform little or nothing in the way of work, without being assisted by the natural agents, such as wood, the motion of water, the expansive power of heat in steam, and, without calling into use, to create the circumstances necessary for the development of these natural powers, a great many mechanical and chemical properties of matter, such as the hardness of steel, the polarity of the magnet, the bleaching quality of chlorine, the velocity of the electric fluid. Most of these qualities, though existing without human agency in the storehouse of Nature, require artificial combinations to exhibit them, and convert them to economic purposes, as co-workers with human muscle in labor-saving machinery. The number and variety of the agents and qualities that the intellect of a people has discovered, and the extent to which, by mastering their laws, and preparing the necessary conditions for their operation, it has reduced them into service, is the most decisive test of its civilization.

There must have been a brief period, in which our first progenitor used only his senses and his muscles to furnish himself with food.

We can conceive, now, some mariner, more hapless than Robinson Crusoe, to have been cast upon a desolate island, without clothing and without tools. To reach an idea of the process through which our race has arrived at its present power, we must conceive him as an uninstructed savage, destitute of all that knowledge, some portion of which is imbibed by the most ignorant member of a civilized community. He would gather his food in the first instance from the vines and the fruit-bearing trees, and might find shelter in a cave, or the hollow of a decayed oak. We can imagine him running down some animals by pure swiftness of foot, throttling and killing them by main strength, tearing their flesh with his teeth, and devouring it raw. The idea would occur to him, that the skin which had kept the animal warm might protect him from the dews of night, or at least make a softer pillow than a stone or a log. He can break the limb from a tree, and use it as a club against an animal, whose claws or teeth render the attempt to subdue it by the naked hands dangerous; and by throwing it he may kill at a distance, or overtake by the missile, one whose fleetness surpasses his own. His power is thus greatly increased, and he may master three animals with as little expense of time and muscular exertion as one had cost him before. The natural agents have begun to co-operate with him— the weight and hardness of wood enable him to kill a beast which he could not have choked-the fact that he can give greater velocity to a missile than to his own body, enables him to arrest the flight of another, which his legs could not have overtaken. With the sharp edge of a shell, picked up on the sea-shore, or of a flint, he can cut and fashion his stick, and tying the flint to its end with a thong, he obtains a spear. Having found a cutting instrument in the flint, a bow and arrows are of easy acquisition. Having obtained them, he has a new natural agent for his ally, the elasticity of wood, and with it he overmatches the fleetness of the swiftest, and the strength of the most formidable beast. His power of procuring animal food is immensely enhanced. His stock of skins is increased in the same proportion, and he has leisure to fashion them into clothing and a tent. These obtained, he is no longer under the every night to his cave or his hollow tree, but may make extended journeys to find the best hunting-grounds,

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or the regions most productive in fruits, best sheltered from storms, and most inaccessible by dangerous beasts of prey, where, by the aid of his flint knife, he may build a larger house of the branches of trees, than he could conveniently carry about with him, and furnishing room to store his game and fruits, that the superfluity of one day may enable him to devote the following to the work of preparing other utensils, for cooking and preserving his meat. The great novel fact in his condition is, that a natural agent, the elasticity of wood, does a large portion of the work that formerly taxed his muscles. Nine-tenths of his labour is cast upon Nature, who does it gratuitously, and gives him the time and strength thus spared to add to his comforts, without demanding any share in them. From the bow and arrow, up to Ericsson's Caloric Engine and the Electric Telegraph, the law is the same; every natural agent acts without remuneration, and co-operating with human labour makes it more effective. Each one requires, as the conditions of its activity, combinations of matter, which we call tools or machinery. Every new agent taken into partnership with human toil, facilitates the acquisition of fresh and more effective powers, and each new machine is cheaper than its predecessor-regard being had to its relative effectiveness, because it is the product in a larger degree of natural agents, which work for nothing, and in a less degree of muscular force, which, whether in man or animals, can only be exerted under the stimulus of food, and therefore must be purchased by food.

We have employed several words in the last paragraph, such as gratuitous, cheap, purchased, which grow out of the fact of exchange and imply its existence. They involve also the idea of Value, inseparably connected with that of Exchange. It being impossible to continue a discussion of this nature without their constant use, it is therefore important to fix their sense, that is, to inquire what are the facts they denote.

The solitary savage, whose progress we have been tracing, does everything for himself. This is the characteristic of savage life; each man hunts, fishes, bakes, builds, brings and carries, and constructs the tools employed in all these operations, for himself; while an advanced stage of civilization is marked by each person's confining himself to a very restricted routine of occupation, and depending

for the supply of most, sometimes of all, his wants, upon the labours of others. A man may work a lifetime in building steam-engines without ever using them, and yet thousands of men have contributed more or less of their toil to the growth, manufacture, and transportation of the articles which he consumes in a single day. Multitudes of men and of forces are continually toiling in part for him; and his share of the products of their labour is got to him through an almost interminable series of exchanges, indirectly effected through the medium of money.

The primitive form of exchange is Barter. It presupposes a diversity of products, and, therefore, of labour. It involves a comparison of the service rendered with the service received; of the labour which it would require to obtain the thing to be parted with, and that which would be expended in procuring the thing offered in exchange.

Suppose the savage who had a bow, and with it the power to obtain as much venison in one day as he could in ten previous to owning it, to discover at the opposite extremity of his island another who has no bow, but who has made a fish-hook out of a crooked bone, and to offer deer's meat in exchange for fish-upon what terms would they barter? The fisherman has fish that it has cost him nine hours to catch; the hunter offers him for them as much venison as requires, upon the average, one hour's labour of a man armed with bow and arrows, or ten hours' labour of a man without them. The fisherman would reason -"It will take me but nine hours to replace my fish by others equal in number and quality, but to get as much venison will cost ten hours." There is a gain of an hour's labour to him in the exchange; and it is no impediment to the bargain, that he knows the bowsman effects a saving of nine hours by purchasing his fish instead of catching them. The exchange is made, to the mutual profit of the parties, and the hunter goes back to his side of the island; not, however, without having observed how easy it will be to provide himself with a hook and line, and do his own fishing when he pleases.

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The fisherman is confined to the shore for lack of a boat. sees a log floating, and the idea occurs to him that it may be hollowed by fire, and the exterior hewed into shape by a rude axe,

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