Page:Tales in Political Economy by Millicent Garrett Fawcett.djvu/46

 hands and other signs of approval. Every eye was now turned on the captain for a reply. He said, "I am not going to deny, and I think no one will deny, that those among us who have ripe corn now in the market will not get in exchange for it what they would have got if these plantain-trees had not been found, and that the labour it has been necessary to give to the cultivation of corn will be needed no longer. But that is not everything that we ought to think of. We do not live to labour, but we labour in order to live—that is, we labour to supply our wants. If our wants can be supplied with a smaller amount of labour than we have hitherto been compelled to give, it is so much the better for us all. We can either labour less and enjoy the same degree of comfort; or we can labour as much as we did before and obtain a larger number of comforts and gratifications. Those who have up to this time given so many weeks and months of labour to the cultivation of corn complain that their labour is now superseded. But this means, that what formerly it took many months of labour to procure can