_Labor is never without employment._ If one obstacle is removed, it seizes another, and mankind is delivered from two obstacles by the same effort which was at first necessary for one. If the labor of coopers could become useless, it must take another direction. To maintain that human labor can end by wanting employment, it would be necessary to prove that mankind will cease to encounter obstacles. CHAPTER III. EFFORT--RESULT. We have seen that between our wants and their gratification many obstacles are interposed. We conquer or weaken these by the employment of our faculties. It may be said, in general terms, that industry is an effort followed by a result. But by what do we measure our well-being? By our riches? By the result of our effort, or by the effort itself? There exists always a proportion between the effort employed and the result obtained. Does progress consist in the relative increase of the second or of the first term of this proportion--between effort or result? Both propositions have been sustained, and in political economy opinions are divided between them. According to the first system, riches are the result of labor. They increase in the same ratio as _the result does to the effort_. Absolute perfection, of which God is the type, consists in the infinite distance between these two terms in this relation, viz., effort none, result infinite. The second system maintains that it is the effort itself which forms the measure of, and constitutes, our riches. Progression is the increase of the _proportion of the effect to the result_. Its ideal extreme may be represented by the eternal and fruitless efforts of Sisyphus.[A] [Footnote A: We will therefore beg the reader to allow us in future, for the sake of conciseness, to designate this system under the term of _Sisyphism_, from Sisyphus, who, in punishment of his crimes, was compelled to roll a stone up hill, which fell to the bottom as fast as he rolled it to the top, so that his labor was interminable as well as fruitless.] The first system tends naturally to the encouragement of everything which diminishes difficulties, and augments production--as powerful machinery, which adds to the strength of man; the exchange of produce, which allows us to profit by the various natural agents distributed in different degrees over the surface of our globe; the intellect which discovers, the experience which proves, and the emulation which excites. The second as logically inclines to everything which can augment the difficulty and diminish the product; as, privileges, monopolies, restrictions, prohibition, suppression of machinery, sterility, &c. It is well to mark here that the universal practice of men is always guided by the principle of the first system. Every _workman_, whether agriculturist, manufacturer, merchant, soldier, writer or philosopher, devotes the strength of his intellect to do better, to do more quickly, more economically--in a word, _to do more with less_.