_The Vital Importance of Continued Improvement._--Intelligent study will make it clear to every one that any assertion that machinery is the enemy of labor is not merely erroneous, it is a contradiction of the most striking and important fact connected with general progress. The gains of labor during the past century, which have been partly due to the occupation of areas of new land, have been largely due to the mechanical inventions and technical discoveries which have put the forces of nature so largely at man's disposal. These forces have worked for all society, indeed, but they have worked largely for the men who labor, whether in the factory, in the shop, on the railroad, or on the farm. Their effects are all-pervasive, since they signify an increase in the productive power of that final unit of social labor on which wages generally depend. General riches have been and must continue to be generally beneficent. As an isolated man working, Crusoe-like, for himself alone, gains by every technical discovery he can make and by everything he can add to his stock of productive appliances, so society, the great and isolated organism which is the tenant of our planet, reaps a benefit by every improvement it can make, and the forces of distribution see to it that this benefit is carried through and through the system and made to improve the condition of the most humble members. Since the great areas of new land are no longer available as a future resource, the hope of labor during the coming centuries, under any form of industrial organization, whether it be competitive or socialistic, rests on the prospect of continued technical gains,--an unending succession of calls on the exhaustless serving power of nature. _The Effect of Changes in the Relative Amounts of Labor and Capital._--The law of wages, as stated in an early chapter of this work, makes it evident that an increase of population, while the social fund of capital remains the same, would reduce the product of marginal labor and therefore the rate of wages. In every establishment into which more workmen should come, while its capital remained the same in amount, the power of an individual worker to produce goods would be lessened. Moreover, any influx of laborers into the society as a whole would be attended by a diffusion of them among all the groups and subgroups, so that the power of an individual laborer to create any kind of goods would be reduced. This means that labor has lost some of its power to create _commodity_, which is the concrete name for general wealth, and its wages fall accordingly.