176 THE DIVISION OF LABOUR 



nothing abnormal or peculiar in this isolation and 

 consequent self-sufficiency of the Indian village ; on 

 the contrary, it was the universal characteristic of 

 village life, and the only organization of industry 

 possible in the absence of means of transport. We 

 find it at the beginning of the nineteenth century even 

 among the farmers of New England. ' They lived 

 mainly upon what they produced themselves, and 

 many of their exchanges were made without the in- 

 tervention of money. They swopped or bartered 

 services in the erection of their dwellings or in 

 harvesting ; they raised, spun, and wove their own 

 wool ; they packed their own pork ; they raised their 

 own corn, and paid for grinding it by a toll in kind ; 

 they cut their own fuel.'* The modern organization of 

 industry which has displaced this older one in Europe 

 and America owes its success to a more elaborate 

 division of labour. Nowadays, in Europe or America, 

 cloth is manufactured at a great mill in a town or dis- 

 trict wholly devoted to this industry, where an alert 

 business manager imports wool and cotton at the best 

 advantage, where production is carried on upon so 

 large a scale that the employment of steam-power 

 and complicated machinery is remunerative, and where 

 highly skilled workmen can be employed and can be 

 nicely graded to the different processes of manufac- 

 ture. In these conditions cotton or woollen cloth can 

 be produced so advantageously that even after the 

 cost of carriage has been paid it can be sold in remote 

 hamlets as cheaply as the product of the spinning- 

 wheel and the hand-loom. The farmer, therefore, finds 

 that it is most profitable to him to devote himself ex- 

 clusively to his own industry, and exchange his product 

 for town-made cloth. The same is true of other in- 

 dustries. The iron-master makes it his business to 

 find out the conditions in which his customer, the 



* ' The Distribution of Products,' by Ed. Atkinson. G. P. Putnam 

 and Sons, New York, 1890. 



