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Rural Economy in New England 267 



Thus we can see that the distinction between various occupations 

 which we had set up for purposes of analysis tends to vanish. The 

 broad outlines of a future division of employments were marked 

 out, but the process of separation was as yet hardly begun. 



The disadvantages of this lack of specialization, this combination 

 of several professions, occupations or trades in each individual, 

 are obvious and must have been recognized even then. The doctor 

 and the lawyer, the cobbler and the carpenter, as well as the com- 

 munity which they served, must have known that each one of them 

 could have been far more efficient if only he could have devoted his 

 entire attention to one occupation. They knew "practice makes 

 perfect," and how could the practice of any trade or profession be- 

 become perfect when it must continually be interrupted in order 

 to procure from the soil a partial subsistence? If they recognized 

 the defects in their economic organization, why did they not remedy 

 them? If they realized the advantages which might be expected 

 from greater specialization, why did they not introduce it? The solu- 

 tion of this problem is found in the limited extent of the demand 

 for the services of the non-agricultural class. The towns were 

 small and the purchasing power of the farmers, for reasons which 

 will appear in later chapters, was set within very narrow limits. 

 Hence such a community could not furnish sufficient demand for 

 the products and services of specialized non-agricultural workers 

 to provide the latter with a living. Their only resource to supply 

 the deficiency in income was the soil. Hence the union of all trades, 

 businesses and professions with agriculture.^ 



Our interest in this essay is primarily in the agricultural popula- 

 tion; hence it is pertinent to inquire how the farmers were affected 

 by this combination of employments which we have observed in 

 the rural town. Did it make any difference to the plain farmer, 

 the man who was getting his living merely from cultivating the soil, 

 whether his neighbors, the miller and the carpenter, were farmers 



^ No better illustration than this could be desired of the famous dictum of 

 Adam Smith that "the division of labour is limited by the extent of the mar- 

 ket." He says: "As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the divi- 

 sion of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent 

 of that power, or, in other words, by the extent of the market. When the market 

 is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely 

 to one employment, for want of the power to exchange all that surplus part of 

 the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his consumption, for such 

 parts of the produce of other men's labour as he has occasion for.'*" Wealth of 

 Nations. Book I. Chap. III. p. 15. (Everyman's edition). 



