No effect, whether favorable or unfavorable, can be vested permanently in the producer. His advantages and disadvantages, derived from his relations to nature and to society, both pass gradually from him; and by an almost insensible tendency are absorbed and fused into the community at large--the community considered as consumers. This is an admirable law, alike in its cause and its effects; and he who shall succeed in making it well understood, will have a right to say, "I have not, in my passage through the world, forgotten to pay my tribute to society." Every circumstance which favors the work of production is of course hailed with joy by the producer, for its _immediate effect_ is to enable him to render greater services to the community, and to exact from it a greater remuneration. Every circumstance which injures production, must equally be the source of uneasiness to him; for its _immediate effect_ is to diminish his services, and consequently his remuneration. This is a fortunate and necessary law of nature. The immediate good or evil of favorable or unfavorable circumstances must fall upon the producer, in order to influence him invisibly to seek the one and to avoid the other. Again: when an inventor succeeds in his labor-saving machine, the _immediate_ benefit of this success is received by him. This again is necessary, to determine him to devote his attention to it. It is also just; because it is just that an effort crowned with success should bring its own reward. But these effects, good and bad, although permanent in themselves, are not so as regards the producer. If they had been so, a principle of progressive and consequently infinite inequality would have been introduced among men. This good, and this evil, both therefore pass on, to become absorbed in the general destinies of humanity. How does this come about? I will try to make it understood by some examples. Let us go back to the thirteenth century. Men who gave themselves up to the business of copying, received for this service _a remuneration regulated by the general rate of the profits_. Among them is found one, who seeks and finds the means of rapidly multiplying copies of the same work. He invents printing. The first effect of this is, that the individual is enriched, while many more are impoverished. At the first view, wonderful as the discovery is, one hesitates in deciding whether it is not more injurious than useful. It seems to have introduced into the world, as I said above, an element of infinite inequality. Guttenberg makes large profits by this invention, and perfects the invention by the profits, until all other copyists are ruined. As for the public--the consumer--it gains but little, for Guttenberg takes care to lower the price of books only just so much as is necessary to undersell all rivals.