_The Impossibility of Reducing Capital by too Rapid Progress._--There is a theoretical question whether this series might be too rapid to permit this result. If the interval were a month instead of several years, and if the amount of capital put into the new appliances were the same that, in the figure, they are represented as requiring, the effect would be to make twelve deductions from the amount of the social capital in the course of a year, which would carry it some distance below its original level, _while in this one year_ there would have been no time for the profits to accrue in order to restore and add to the fund. In the next year and the following ones this would follow, and the effect, in the course of ten years, would be to carry the social capital to a still higher level than the one it reaches in consequence of the slower succession of economical changes. Increasing the rapidity of productive inventions only multiplies the additions made to the social capital. We may summarize the chief facts concerning technical progress as follows:-- (1) Progress may throw particular men out of their present employment, but cannot destroy the social demand for their labor. Somewhere in society there is a place for them. (2) If improvements were long confined to one subgroup, they might send labor into other subgroups and even into other general groups. Occurring as they do at nearly all parts of the system, they very seldom require an absolute diminution of the amount of labor in a subgroup, and practically never cause such a reduction in a general group. (3) The gradual introduction of an improvement is important, since it affords time for an increase in the social demand for the product which is thus cheapened and for introducing at many other points improvements which neutralize, in a large degree, the labor-expelling effect of the first improvement. (4) Technical gains are the largest source of additions to the total amount of the social capital. The constant influx of new capital facilitates the placing of laborers at the points where they are needed. (5) The fact that elementary utilities which are produced by agriculture cater to a less elastic demand than do the form utilities which are the product of manufacturing occupations, has caused labor to move slowly from the lowest subgroups of the various series to the upper ones, as the productive power of labor in agriculture has increased. (6) This movement is so gradual that it can be accomplished almost entirely by devoting to the industries constituting the upper subgroups an enlarged share of new laborers as they enter the field in quest of employment. Young men drift from the farm to the village and the city.