hundred, if thereby forty men are tossed into unwilling idleness, and must live on charity, some of the forty losing all habits of industry, and perhaps becoming criminal. This is a national loss. Further, our hypothesis that the men voluntarily become more industrious may be called an extreme and unlikely case. For that very reason it has been here adopted. The ordinary causes give us _a fortiori_ argument, because they are ever in action. _Skill_ naturally increases among men employed continuously on any work. In a settled, industrious nation small improvements accumulate. In modern Europe the cultivation of mechanics and chemistry conduces to a steady improvement in tools, a cheapening also of tools, and introduction of such more complex tools as we call "machines," by dint of all which human work constantly becomes more effective, so that fewer and fewer workmen are needed for _the same amount_ of produce. Thus the normal and natural order of things, wherever _the wage-system exists_ tends to dispense with some, or many, of the workmen. This is a clear gain if the men thus displaced _are instantly taken up for some other service_. But this seldom can happen; often their old skill is made useless, and before they can learn a new trade they become demoralized, and many perish. The loss of their industrial position is a grievance and a national mischief which our "Economists" are prone to undervalue, and pass unnoticed. Let us contrast the case of men who work not for a master, not for wages, but for themselves; holding their own little homestead, from which they cannot be driven out. Such is the case of back-settlers in the Far West of the United States. Each perhaps carries out with him a box of stout clothes, some agricultural tools and important seeds, and either _squats_ on a bit of wild land, or by a very easy payment buys possession of the Federal Government. This bit of land the settler counts _his own_. With the aid of friendly neighbours he builds the rude log-hut. The felling of the trees needed to construct it makes an opening for small culture. In a very few years he raises more food than his family needs. If the season and the roads favour, he sends his superfluous barrels of corn and fruit eastward, and recovers an equivalent. But what happens if wide distance part him from civilized towns, if the roads are swampy and not made by art, and the conveyance of food be too onerous to remunerate him? All his neighbours being in like case, there is a local Overproduction of food; yet not one of the little community is thereby made a pauper. No one is able to expel them from their rude homes, or forbid their cultivation. They are not made outcasts or idlers. Simply they are kept poorer, than with access to a market they would have been; but they lessen their production of food, and either with the females of the family work at clothing, or execute carpentering. In many ways they can use their time to