Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/241

Rh as they could working separately. They have now combined their efforts, which before were merely added together. The combination has brought forth a new and enlarged result. It has increased the result geometrically. By uniting and helping each other, they have gained a better living than they could possibly have got by working separately.

This way of uniting human effort let us call combination. But we need not enter into any quibble as to the precise place to draw the line between aggregation and combination. If anybody chooses to confuse the two, no economic argument will be affected one way or the other. If the distinction does not beget clearness of thought, it will have served no purpose whatever, and may be ignored; for, henceforth, we shall mostly be thinking about combination, and very seldom of mere pooling or aggregation of effort.

1. The simplest form of combination is where two or more men carry a burden too heavy for either alone, but which can not be divided. Pall-bearers, or the bearers of a sedan-chair, or track-layers on a railroad, or the builders of a log-house, illustrate this extremely simple and direct form of the combination of human effort to bring about a result unattainable by separate effort. Even in this simple form of mutual helpfulness it is plainly seen that two and two do not make four—they make five, or ten, or a hundred.

2. The next most simple form of combination is where two or more persons are working at the same undertaking in the same place, or under the same management, but attending to different parts of it. Every factory, mill, shop, store, or jobbing-house, illustrates this form. There are division and diversity of work, but the product is one. So it is with the players in a play. Their parts are diverse, but the play is a unit, and they all work together. Here it is plainer than ever that ten or fifteen human beings, by combining their efforts, can do for us in three hours what one person could not do in a lifetime.

3. One step more in the direction of complexity, and we reach a form of combination wherein all still contribute to the production of a single article or result, but work in different places, different factories, different countries, perhaps, and especially under different management or conditions. A striking example of this is the cotton-grower, whose immediate product is of extremely little use until it has been transported many miles and been worked upon by another set of human beings, generally of a different race and color. But this is only one example, though perhaps the most striking, of the third form of combination of human effort, in which persons widely separated by space as well as by diversity of gifts and employments, jointly contribute to a single and strictly unified product or result.

It is often a business question with the leader of an enterprise whether he shall adopt the second or third form of combination; and still oftener how far he shall follow one and how far the other. In