=The Purposes of Commerce.=—The people of the world spend a large part of their energy in supplying their material wants, including food, clothing, and shelter. We commonly think of the farmer and the manufacturer as the ones chiefly engaged in this task, but if you stop to think of it you will quickly realize that the farmers could not feed the world nor could the manufacturers clothe it without the aid of another important class, which includes merchants, traders, transportation workers—in a word, all who are engaged in commerce. The purpose of commerce is not to create things but to put economic goods into the hands of those who need them. It places commodities where they are wanted at the time when they are wanted. [Sidenote: Commerce produces values.] In this sense commerce is a great producer, a producer of values. It fetches the raw material from the mines or agricultural areas to the industries. It brings the products of the factories to the merchant and from the merchant to the homes of the people. It helps to adjust the supply to the demand. Without commerce there would be an abundance of things in one place and a shortage in another. Commercial organization permits every part of the country, and indeed every part of the civilized world, to produce the things which it is best fitted to produce and to use these things in buying goods made elsewhere. Florida grows oranges and Massachusetts makes shoes, but through channels of commerce each secures what it needs from the products of the other. [Sidenote: Commerce in its earliest forms.] =The Development of Commerce.=—Now although the advantages of commerce are so easy to realize, the commercial system of the modern world took many centuries to develop. Primitive people did not have many wants and all of them they supplied by their own exertions. Each little group of people, each tribe or village, met its own needs. Then trade between different villages and tribes began. It grew slowly in the early ages because there were no easy means of transporting goods, and because neighboring tribes were so often hostile to each other. This early trade was conducted by barter, the direct exchange of one article for another, there being no general use of money as a medium of exchange.