Page:Tales in Political Economy by Millicent Garrett Fawcett.djvu/54

 more abundantly rewarded than it now was in the old and easily accessible pools. The fish that were brought home as the result of these distant fishing excursions exchanged for other commodities in proportion to the labour endured and danger incurred by those who procured them. For instance, the carpenter at the end of the ten years had to give a greater value of the articles he produced, in exchange for a meal of fish, than he had when first he began to live by his carpentering. The danger and difficulty of fishing had increased; there was no danger in the carpenter's work, and its difficulty had been reduced by the adoption of various means of saving labour, and by improvements in the tools. Therefore, at the end of the ten years, the products of the carpenter's and the fisherman's labour exchanged in a different proportion to that at which they had exchanged at first. The carpenter's work had become less costly; the fish had become more costly; so that an amount of fish which the carpenter could once obtain in exchange for half-a-dozen washerwomens' [sic] clothes-pegs, or a couple of