WACES, LABOUR AND TRADES' UNION. 469 



week for his individual labour ; or fifty of them, or say eighty of 

 them, being employed at thirty shillings a week, with the unemployed 

 hands, from twenty to fifty in number, dependant upon them for sup- 

 port ? This, we say, is the question for that particular body of men. 

 The question for the public is of a wider import. The connexion 

 between all branches of trade and manufacture is so universal and 

 so sensitive, that not one particular branch can suffer check or 

 hinderance without affecting in some degree every other link in the 

 chain of exchange. We will take printing, or the manufacture of 

 books, again, as our illustration. On the printer directly depends the 

 paper-maker, the type-founder, the ink-manufacturer, the press- 

 joiner. On the paper-maker directly depends the engineer, the 

 druggist and the rag-merchant ; and on the rag-merchant, in some 

 measure, depends the cotton-weaver and draper. The type-founder 

 employs the miner to procure his metals and his coals ; the ink-ma- 

 nufacturer employs the oil-merchant, and through him the whale- 

 fishers, and others employed in shipping. All these parties, and many 

 more are, to be employed before the book is printed. After it is 

 printed there are the bookbinders, booksellers, and others to have a 

 hand in the business and the profits of production before the book 

 finds its way to the book-shelves of the reader. It must be obvious, 

 therefore, that everything that can facilitate the cheap multiplication 

 of books must give additional employment to all these branches of 

 industry, cause an increased demand for hands, reduce the number 

 of idlers in the community, and, by reducing the number of candi- 

 dates for labour and wages, increase the value of the latter, and even% 

 tually not only enrich and improve the state at large, but the condi- 

 tion of its individual Labourers also. The experience of late years in 

 this very branch of production will be found fully to bear out this 

 train of reasoning. By the introduction of what is termed machine 

 printing, whereby two men and a boy can throw off five or six times 

 as many copies of a work in a given time as could formerly be done 

 by the common hand-press ; and by the invention of stereotype copies 

 of the type-forms of the work itself, the multiplication of books is 

 increased in quantity and cheapness beyond all that could have been 

 anticipated. When these methods of production were first intro- 

 duced, they were viewed with jealousy and alarm by the workmen 

 already in employ under the old system, who naturally thought that 

 if one man could now do the work of ten, the other nine would be 

 thrown out of work and left to starve. But they forgot one very 

 material point in the case that as there has been no limit as yet as- 

 signed to production, so there is no assignable limit to demand. The 

 natural limit to production is, in all cases, the demand and the de- 

 mand is limited by the cost. If one man can be made to do the 

 work of ten in the way of production, it is not unreasonable to say 

 that twenty men can afford to purchase a book at a penny for one 

 that could buy it at sixpence. The number of employers is thereby 

 multiplied twentyfold, and it follows most arithmetically that, instead 

 of the number of employed being reduced to a tenth of what they 

 were before, they must be increased twofold to meet the increased 

 demand. But this is not all. We have seen that printers are 



