[Sidenote: CHAP. XIX.] When they cannot augment their numbers, they will introduce machines into many manufactures; and these will supply the want, without adding to the consumption of their food. Foreigners, astonished at a novelty which lowers prices, and checks their growing industry, will copy the inventions; but being no more than scholars, who go aukwardly to work, this improvement will throw many of their hands into idleness: the machines will be cried down, and the traders will laugh in their sleeves, well knowing that nothing is more easy than to put work into the hands of an industrious man made idle. Wit and genius, in short, will always set him who possesses them above the level of his fellows, and when one resource fails him, he will contrive another. [Sidenote: CHAP. XX.] The wit I here mention is not that acquired in the closet; for there one may learn, that an equal distribution of lands was so favourable to multiplication in antient times, that it must be owing to a contrary practice, that our numbers now are so much smaller. But he who walks abroad, and sees millions who have not one moment’s time to put a spade in the ground, so busily are they employed in that branch of industry which is put into their hands, must readily conclude, that circumstances are changed, and that the fewer people are necessary for feeding the whole society, the more must remain free to be employed in providing every other thing that can make life agreeable, both to themselves and to strangers; who in return deliver into the hands of their industrious servants, the ensigns of superiority and dominion, money. Who is best employed, he who works to feed himself, or he who works to be fed, cloathed, and supplied, disposing only of his superfluities to those whom, consequently, he shortly must command. This is obtained by the introduction of the useful species of agriculture, and by the explosion of the abusive. And when strangers are so kind as to allow their neighbours the privilege of clothing and adorning them, good nature, not to say self-interest, demands, in return, that the first be indulged in a permission to exercise those branches of toil and labour which are the least profitable, though the most necessary for the subsistence of the latter.