420 Hitman Physiology. 



commodities t may be very largely reduced. Here is a double 

 saving. 



England has a vast army of shopkeepers,, who have to be 

 supported in what is equivalent to idleness that is, useless 

 labour, by a heavy tax levied on the whole community in 

 the form of large profits and scandalous adulterations. A 

 village of five thousand inhabitants has eight groceries, six 

 drapers' shops, four shoe-dealers, three druggists, three iron- 

 mongers, three bakers, and so on with the whole variety of 

 trades, and a corresponding number of assistants to pay and 

 families to support. The cost to the community in profits 

 ranges from ten to three hundred per cent. It is evident 

 that this entire work could be done, in a well-arranged esta- 

 blishment, by one-tenth of the number now employed, and at 

 one-twentieth of the cost, with better articles and a freedom 

 from fraud and adulteration. 



But this is only half the saving. Every person relieved 

 from this needless business of petty trade would be free to 

 become a producer of something useful, and so enrich the 

 community. Every man paid to be idle or uselessly employed, 

 is a double loss; first, in what he is paid for doing nothing; 

 secondly, in what we should gain if he did something. Knock 

 a man on the head, and society loses what it might gain by his 

 labour; pay him to be idle, and you lose what you pay and 

 he consumes in addition. We lose the producing value of out 

 soldiers and policemen, and we feed and clothe them besides. 

 Each idle man, rich or poor, robs the community of the labour 

 of all who supply his real or fancied needs. The rich man 

 who keeps twenty servants, robs the public of the productive 

 labour of twenty persons, and also of the labour of those who 

 feed and clothe them. He and they render no equivalent. 

 They are fed, clothed, sheltered, transported from place to 

 place, and in every way provided for by the labour of the 

 industrious; -and every superfluous shopkeeper is in the same 



