Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/511

Rh and, by cementation, it is converted into steel. The steel is wrought, and a thousand things directly useful to man are produced.

The utility of these last products increases in a direct ratio to the amount of labor which men have expended. An anvil weighing a thousand pounds is less useful than a thousand wrought files; it costs less labor. A thousand pounds' weight of files costs less labor than a thousand pounds' weight of watch-springs; they contain in themselves a smaller sum of utility. You can easily understand that if the anvil made in a day contained as much utility and was of as great value as a ton of watch-springs, which it took several months to make, everybody would prefer to forge anvils, and no one would weary himself in flattening watch-springs.

Neither a decree, nor a decision, nor a political law, has arranged matters in this wise; Nature herself has done it.

It is necessary, indispensable, inevitable, that labor should constantly augment the utility of things, and that men should buy them at the price of greater efforts on learning that they are more useful. Not only is the existence of utility merely relative to man, but it continually varies with our natural or artificial wants.

A stove is useless at Senegal; an ice-making machine is useless at Spitzbergen. In a locksmith's eyes, pincers are objects of first necessity; a duchess has no use for them. On the other hand, a little bonnet, which does not cover her head, is more useful to her than sixty pairs of pincers, for she requires it to drive in her carriage in the park, and she pays for it accordingly. The agreeable and the useful are perpetually confounded in an advanced state of civilization: I have explained why, in showing that our wants increase with our resources.

Time and distance augment or diminish the utility of our goods. A thing in your hand is of more use to you than if it were ten leagues off. At the distance of ten leagues it is more useful than if it were in America. The greater the distance, the greater is the labor required to enjoy it; you must either pay the cost of carriage or go for it yourself. This fatigue and this outlay are equivalent to the labor that must be expended, for instance, in order to convert iron into steel. A thousand francs in Paris are worth more to a Parisian than a thousand francs in Brussels; a thousand francs in Brussels are worth more than if they were in New York. In like manner a thousand francs which are given you to-day are evidently of greater use than a thousand francs which will be given to you ten years hence. A thousand francs obtainable in ten years are more useful and are worth more than a thousand francs of which the possession is postponed for fifty years. The return may indeed be safe and certainly guaranteed; the question is utility as regards yourself, and you are not sure of living long enough to enjoy a benefit so long deferred.

The utility clearest to all eyes is that residing in material things.