Diversification of employments, resulting from combination of action, thus enables men to economize labour and to increase production. Increased production, on the other hand, makes a demand for labour. The more wheat raised and the more cloth made, the more there will be to give in exchange for labour, the greater will be the number of persons seeking for labourers, and the greater will be the power of men to determine for themselves the mode in which they will employ their time or their talents. If, therefore, we desire to see men advance in freedom, we must endeavour to increase the productive power; and that, as we see, grows with the growth of the power to improve the land, while it diminishes with every diminution in the power to return to the land the manure yielded by its products. In purely agricultural countries there is little demand for labour, and it always tends to diminish, as may be proved by any reader of this volume who may chance to occupy a purely agricultural neighbourhood. Let him look around him, and he will, without difficulty, find hundreds of men, and hundreds of women and children, wasting more time than would, if properly employed, purchase twice the clothing and twice the machinery of production they are now enabled to obtain. Why, however, he will probably ask, is it that they do so waste it? Because there is no demand for it, except in agriculture; and when that is the case, there must necessarily be great waste of time. At one season of the year the farm requires much labour, while at another it needs but little; and if its neighbours are all farmers, they are all in the same situation. If the weather is fit for ploughing, they and their horses and men are all employed. If it is not, they are all idle. In winter they have all of them little to do; in harvest-time they are all overrun with work; and crops frequently perish on the ground for want of the aid required for making them. Now, it would seem to be quite clear that if there existed some other mode of employment that would find a demand for the surplus labour of the neighbourhood, all would be benefited. The man who had a day's labour to sell could sell it, and, with the proceeds of the labour of a very few days, now wasted, could purchase clothing for his children, if, indeed, the labour of those children, now also wasted, did not more than pay for all the clothing, not only of themselves, but of his wife and himself.