The industrial equipment of the world meanwhile goes on increasing, though it is already so great that its capacity cannot be fully utilized. In the United States alone there is probably enough surplus machine-capacity to satisfy the whole demand of Great Britain’s foreign customers for staple merchandise, such as textiles, iron and steel manufacturers, rubber tires, motor-cars, electrical apparatus, machinery, glass, garments, shoes, cutlery, and so on. Great Britain not only has a surplus of machine-power; she has besides an excess of man-power represented by say one and one-quarter millions unemployed. She could easily take on the entire foreign trade of France; but in France also there is a surplus of machine-power. Both Great Britain and France dread the competition of Germany, whose production of goods with her existing equipment could be increased, under incentive, nobody knows how much. The exterior facts do not make sense. They represent industry to be witless, in that, while dreading surplus as the evil that devoureth profit, it is at the same time bent to push supply to a point beyond saturation. Industry does not do this. Necessity does it. There is an interior fact. The tendency of the divisible product of machines to exceed the sum of effective desire is the last thing that industry wishes for. It is owing to a principle hitherto mentioned, namely, the principle that the cheapness of things is in proportion to the quantity produced. Which now is to be explained. It is the economic function of the machine to cheapen production. There is otherwise no point to it. But, if we say things are more cheaply made by machine than by hand, we speak very loosely. What we mean is that a quantity of things is more cheaply made by machine than by hand. For example, the cost of a single yard of cloth produced by machine is hundreds of times greater than the cost of a single yard of it produced by hand. Obviously, the power-loom is a very costly piece of machinery to build, and so is the engine that drives it. If you produced on a power-loom only the amount of cloth a weaver could make by hand, nobody could afford to buy it. But when you produce on the power-loom a quantity of cloth one hundred times greater than a weaver can make by hand, then, of course it is much cheaper. And the more you produce the cheaper it is. So with anything. The greater the quantity, the lower the cost. Hence the terms quantity, or mass-production, meaning, first, to standardize the product, as to make it all black, all one texture, all one width or shape, and then to bring a chain of machine-power continuously to bear upon its multiple production.