Page:Report on Manufactures (Hamilton).djvu/11

 2. An extension of the use of machinery.

3. Additional employment to classes of the community not ordinarily engaged in the business.

4. The promoting of emigration from foreign countries.

5. The furnishing greater scope for the diversity of talents and dispositions, which discriminate men from each other.

6. The affording a more ample and various field for enterprise.

7. The creating, in some instances, a new and securing in all a more certain and steady demand for the surplus produce of the soil.

Each of these circumstances has a considerable influence upon the total mass of industrious effort in a community; together they add to it a degree of energy and effect which are not easily conceived. Some comments upon each of them, in the order in which they have been stated, may serve to explain their importance.

1..

It has justly been observed that there is scarcely anything of greater moment in the economy of a nation than the proper division of labor. The separation of occupations causes each to be carried to a much greater perfection than it could possibly acquire if they were blended. This arises principally from three circumstances.

First. The greater skill and dexterity naturally resulting from a constant and undivided application to a single object. It is evident that these properties must increase in proportion to the separation and simplification of objects and the steadiness of the attention devoted to each, and must be less in proportion to the complication of objects and the number among which the attention is distracted.

Second. The economy of time, by avoiding a loss of it, incident to a frequent transition from one operation to another of a different nature. This depends on various circumstances: The transition itself; the orderly disposition of the implements, machines, and materials employed in the operation to be relinquished; the preparatory steps to the commencement of a new one; the interruption of the impulse which the mind of the workman acquires from being engaged in a particular operation; the distractions, hesitations, and reluctances which attend the passage from one kind of business to another.

Third. An extension of the use of machinery. A man occupied on a single object will have it more in his power and will be more naturally led to exert his imagination in devising methods to facilitate and abridge labor than if he were perplexed by a variety of independent and dissimilar operations. Besides this, the fabrication of machines in numerous instances becoming itself a distinct trade, the artist who follows it has all the advantages which have been enumerated, for improvement in his particular art; and in both ways the invention and application of machinery are extended.

And from these causes united, the mere separation of the occupation of the cultivator from that of the artificer has the effect of augmenting the productive powers of labor and with them the total mass of the produce or revenue of a country. In this single view of the subject, therefore, the utility of artificers or manufacturers toward promoting an increase of productive industry is apparent.