produce and accumulate a capital, through which he could obtain from them articles of convenience and enjoyment which he had neither the leisure nor the skill to make. In this way we may trace the growth of barter, and that most important habit of resorting to fixed spots for commercial and social purposes. In this process the lord had himself a direct and paramount interest. If he took upon himself to maintain freedom of buying and selling, to guarantee peace and security to the chapmen, going and coming, he could claim in return a slight recognition of his services in the shape of toll or custom. If the intervention of his officers supplied an easy mode of attesting the _bona fides_ of a transaction, the parties to it would have been unreasonable had they resisted the jurisdiction which thus gradually grew up. So that on all accounts we may be assured that the lord encouraged as much as possible the resort of strangers to his domain. In the growing prosperity of his dependents, his own condition was immediately and extensively concerned. Even their number was of importance to his revenue, for a capitation-tax, however light, was the inevitable condition of their reception. Their industry as manufacturers or merchants attracted traffic to his channels. Lastly in a military, political and social view, the wealth, the density and the cultivation of his burgher-population were the most active elements of his own power, consideration and influence. What but these rendered the Counts of Flanders so powerful as they were throughout the middle ages? Let it now be only considered with what rapidity all these several circumstances must tend to combine and to develop themselves, as the class of free landowners diminishes in extent and influence and that of the lords increases. Concurrent with such a change must necessarily be the extension of mutual dependence, which is only another name for traffic, and, as far as this alone is concerned, a great advance in the material well-being of society. It is difficult to conceive a more hopeless state than one in which every household should exactly suffice to its own wants, and have no wants but such as itself could supply. Fortunately for human progress, it is one which all experience proves to be impossible. There is no principle of social ethics more certain than this, that in proportion as you secure to a man the command of the necessaries of life, you awaken in him the desire for those things which adorn and refine it. And all experience also teaches that the attempt of any individual to provide both classes of things for himself and within the limits of his own household, will totally fail; that time is wanting to produce any one thing in perfection; that skill can only be attained by exclusive attention to one object; and that a division of labour is indispensable if society is to be enabled to secure, at the least possible sacrifice, the greatest possible amount of comforts and conveniences.