present they satisfy no need and yield no pleasure. We are so habituated to the régime of exchange and sale, and to the continuous disposal of these forms of wealth by their owners for cash wherewith anything and everything can be bought, that we think of them ordinarily in terms of money value, and reckon them as equivalent to the possession of so much completed and enjoyable wealth. But, obviously, for the community as a whole, there is on hand at any given time a great mass of inchoate wealth which as yet can satisfy no want. And at any given time a great part of the labor of the community is devoted to making inchoate wealth, of which no part is directly of use or pleasure to any human being.

On the other hand, part of the labor of to-day is given to the close and immediate satisfaction of our wants. The baker bakes bread, the tailor makes clothes. The shopkeeper sells us things necessary or convenient or agreeable, and so brings them to the point where they finally meet our desires. The servant waits on our needs or contributes to our ease. In a multitude of directions it is the housewife through whom the last stage toward satisfaction is reached. Her labors have been celebrated less. by economists than by poets; yet they play a very large part in that final activity through which a long series of past efforts is at last brought to fruition.

Compare now for a moment these two things on the one hand, that part of the work of to-day which is given to inchoate wealth or uncompleted utilities; on the other hand, that part which serves directly to give satisfaction. Clearly the former is much the larger in volume. It must be remembered that commodities serve to give real satisfaction only when they reach the hands of those who use and enjoy them. That iron and stone, factories and furnaces, raw wool and cotton, grain in the bin, are not available for use or consumption, is obvious enough. It is equally certain, though not so obvious, that flour and cloths and boots are no more available when simply carried to the stage of completion in the mill or factory. To reach the consumer they must first pass through the hands of one or two carriers and two or three sets of middlemen, whose labors form

part of the operation of production quite as much as those of the tillers of the soil and the workers in the factories. It is hardly worth while to lay down any hard-and-fast line in matters of this sort, or to try to define with precision where the very last step comes which brings completion of the products, and so satisfaction to the body of consumers. Ordinarily this stage would not be reached until the goods had been disposed of to purchasers by the retail dealer. While in the shopkeeper's hands, arranged by him and cared for by him, kept and stored in supply large enough and varied enough to meet regular and irregular demands, they are still to be considered as possessing only inchoate utility. Under the conditions of a complicated division of labor, those workers whom in common speech we call producers, as distinguished from the merchants and traders, advance matters a step nearer the end, but usually bring nothing to fruition. The small producer who deals directly with the consumer has not indeed disappeared; but in the communities of advanced civilization the consumer satisfies most of his wants by going to a shop where he finds commodities that have left the factory weeks or months before. The stores of goods that are accumulated in the warehouses of merchants, both of the large dealers and the petty tradesmen, are still on their way to completion, and still form part of the great mass of inchoate wealth. And, to repeat, this mass of inchoate wealth, in any moment, forms much the largest part of the possessions of the community.

It follows that most of the work which is being done at a given moment is work of no immediate service to any one. A few laborers are engaged in putting the finishing touches to commodities on which a complicated series of other laborers have been at work for years, or even decades, in the past. These few alone work to supply our immediate wants. The great mass of workers are engaged in producing tools, materials, railways, factories, goods finished but not yet in the place where the consumer can procure them inchoate wealth of all sorts.

All this is part of the division of labor; it is, in fact, the most important form of the division of labor. While a few men

put the finishing touches, the great mass are busy with preparatory work which is parceled out among them in an infinity of trades and occupations. It is conceivable that some such apportionment of labor might have developed without a corresponding division of the different stages among different individuals. The same man might first mine the ore, then smelt it, then fashion his tool, then use it, and finally make his own clothing or secure his own food. But historically, the process by which so preponderant a part of the labor going on at any one moment has been devoted to preparatory work or inchoate wealth has been accompanied by a corresponding growth and diversification of the division of labor. It may serve to make our subject clearer if we consider it for a moment in this aspect.

The division of labor may be classified, for the present purpose, as of two sorts, contemporaneous and successive. We may designate as contemporaneous that division by which one man does all the work of getting the food, another all that of making the clothes, a third all that of providing shelter, and so on; each carrying out all the steps, from beginning to end, involved in the production of his particular commodity. Under such an arrangement each worker would become expert in his trade and would work at it uninterruptedly. It is conceivable that in a primitive community, where all work was devoted to securing a finished commodity at short order, and few steps intervened between the beginning and the end of production, the productiveness of labor might be considerably increased by such a division of it. But vastly more important in the history of the arts and of civilization is that division which involves a separation of successive related acts, the division in which various steps in production are carried on one after another by different hands, and through which each commodity becomes the product of the complex and combined labors of a great number of men. A set of porters, making a profession of carrying packs, develop their muscles and wind to an extraordinary degree, and become capable of carrying those heavy burdens which astonish the traveler in backward countries. Yet their achievements are as nothing compared with those of the successive

divisions of labor. When one set of men attend to the making of roads, another to the rearing of horses, another to the procuring of iron and timber, others to wheels, wagons, harness, we get in the end, through transportation by wheeled vehicles, an enormous diminution in the labor required for a given result. The contrast is still more striking if we consider the successive division of labor in the last form to which the art of transportation has been carried in the present century. The operations extending over a series of years for cuttings, embankments, tunnels, bridges, not to mention the tools for these, which engaged the energies of a still earlier series of workers; the making of iron and steel, of engines and cars, of the endless variety of railway apparatus, — all finally bring that extraordinary cheapening of transportation which has so completely revolutionized the industry of modern times. To find out how much labor has been given under these methods to any one wagon load or any one car load, we should need to consider, in due measure, all the successive steps. We should need to assign some slight fraction of the labor given to the making of the wagon road or roadbed of the railway; a fraction, less small, of the labor for making the wagons, or the cars and engines; the whole of the labor of those, like the drivers of the horses or the trainmen of the railway, who are engaged immediately in transportation. To carry out directly a calculation of the labor involved in the carriage of a single ton or wagon load would be impossible; but an infallible test the price at which the service can be rendered-shows how enormously more effective is the more extended and complicated mode of doing the work.

It would be difficult to find an historical example of the bare and uncomplicated use of the contemporaneous division of labor. The earliest form doubtless was more or less of the successive sort, and the two have developed hand in hand with the progress of the arts. The contrast between the primitive porter and the railway is obviously a contrast not between the contemporaneous and the successive division of labor, but between two phases of the successive division. The transporting of goods means only that materials are carried to those who are to

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manipulate them, or tools to those who are to use them, or enjoyable goods to those who are to consume them or sell them to consumers. It means but one step-sometimes an early step, sometimes a late one—in the successive division of labor. But it illustrates the contrast between shorter and longer ways of attaining a given end, and the mode in which the progress of invention has caused a long stretch of time to elapse between the first step and the last toward the satisfaction of human wants.

So overpoweringly great have been the results of the successive division of labor, that it is natural to think of its extension as a cause, or at least as a necessary incident, in the increase of the powers of mankind and the abundance of enjoyable goods. In a great number of striking cases we see the progress of the arts taking a direction similar to that which has just been sketched as to the art of transportation. The spinning wheel and the hand loom, easily and simply made, have given way to the jenny and the mule and the power loom, fixed in a great building, and moved by complicated machinery; all involving a longer stage of preparatory effort, and yielding the enjoyable commodity in the end on easier terms. Savages grind corn by rubbing it between two heavy stones which nature happens to have provided in something like the needed shape. The grist mill, with its hewn stones and its simple machinery, serving its own limited neighborhood, represents a considerable extension in time of the productive process, and a great increase in its efficiency. The modern steam mill, with its huge plant, its warehouses and machinery, with the enormous apparatus of railways and steamers for bringing the grain from the four quarters of the globe and transporting the flour to distant consumers, carries both consequences still further. Hence it has been laid down as a general proposition, by one of the ablest and most ingenious writers of our own day, that every increase in the efficiency of labor brings with it an extension in time of the process of production. But it may be questioned whether anything like a

1 Professor Böhm-Bawerk's brilliant analysis, in the opening chapters of the Positive Theory of Capital, has done more than any other single discussion to emphasize the significance of the lengthened period of production. It is due to