_Economy of minute division._—The advantages, limits and disadvantages of minute division of labor are worthy of a more careful discussion, since they bear upon every kind of enterprise and all classes of labor. A large part of the century’s progress in manufacture, and especially the development of machinery in production, has grown out of the extension of this principle of division. An analysis of the particulars by which great saving is made in the cost of production will help us not only to understand the facts better, but to extend the principle in various directions. In the outset it implies the united effort of several workmen in succession and in close combination upon a single product. It is said that a pocket knife, which we buy for fifty cents, has involved in its manufacture the services of seventy-two different persons, doing different things. The perfection of its finish depends upon the perfection of each of these persons in his single act. The cheapness depends upon the readiness with which each act is performed, and the utility of every kind of power employed. A good illustration of division of labor may be found in the process of butchering hogs in a large packing house. The live hogs enter the building in the upper story, while able to carry themselves on their own feet. Their weight then moves them easily on through all the stages of the process. Two men catch the hogs by hooking a short chain about the hind leg and slipping it into the notch of an endless chain power, which hoists them to the carrier, a continuous track upon which a roller attached to the chain may easily move. A single man wields the knife which sticks the hogs. Two men are sufficient to manage the scalding trough. One directs the machine through which the body of each hog is jerked to remove by brushes the mass of hair. Four, perhaps, may handle scrapers as the hogs are dropped upon a platform, and six more may use the shaving knives by which every particle of hair is removed. Two are needed with different tools for beheading; and one makes place for the gambrel. Two remove the feet at opposite ends, three with different implements are needed in removing entrails, two are required to halve the body, while another gives it the final washing. The result is that each hog has passed from the pen to the cooling room in less than ten minutes, and the hogs pass under the hands of these several men at the rate of eight a minute. Each man uses but one tool in one particular spot, and repeats that single act constantly. By a similar division of labor eighteen men are employed in skinning a single beef, a different knife being used for each particular part of the body, and all pass in regular routine over the ten or twelve beeves undergoing the operation. The rapidity of this motion can scarcely be conceived by one who has witnessed simply the butchering upon a farm. All this is due to a minute division of labor into as many tasks as there