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Chap. IV. laborers. If I have made jack-knives, and with the wages received have bought wheat, I have simply exchanged jack-knives for wheat—added jack-knives to the existing stock of wealth and taken wheat from it. And as the demand for consumption determines the direction in which labor will be expended in production, it cannot even be said, so long as the limit of wheat production has not been reached, that I have lessened the stock of wheat, for, by placing jack-knives in the exchangeable stock of wealth and taking wheat out, I have determined labor at the other end of a series of exchanges to the production of wheat, just as the wheat grower, by putting in wheat and demanding jack-knives, determined labor to the production of jack-knives, as the easiest way by which wheat could be obtained.

And so the man who is following the plow—though the crop for which he is opening the ground is not yet sown, and after being sown will take months to arrive at maturity—he is yet, by the exertion of his labor in plowing, virtually producing the food he eats and the wages he receives. For, though plowing is but a part of the operation of producing a crop, it is a part, and as necessary a part as harvesting. The doing of it is a step towards procuring a crop, which by the assurance which it gives of the future crop, sets free from the stock constantly held the subsistence and wages of the plowman. This is not merely theoretically true, it is practically and literally true. At the proper time for plowing, let plowing cease. Would not the symptoms of scarcity at once manifest themselves without waiting for the time of the harvest? Let plowing cease, and would not the effect at once be felt in counting-room, and machine shop, and factory? Would not loom and spindle soon stand as idle as the plow? That this would be so, we see in the effect which immediately follows a bad season. And if this would be so, is not the man who plows really producing his subsistence and wages as much as though during the day or week his labor actually resulted in the things for which his labor is exchanged?

As a matter of fact, where there is labor looking for