Page:Tales in Political Economy by Millicent Garrett Fawcett.djvu/59

 might have as many cherries as they could gather in twenty minutes, they would get in that time many more than four other boys who were allowed to attack the tree afterwards for the same time and on the same conditions. The first party of boys would gather all the cherries that could be most easily and quickly reached; the second party would have to climb to the topmost branches and strip off every tiny fruit. So it was with our islanders and their plantains: every succeeding year an additional quantity of food was required, and it had to be procured at a constantly increasing cost of labour. It may perhaps be thought that as the labour necessary to supply a given quantity of the plantain fruit steadily increased, and thereby increased the cost of obtaining food, therefore the cost of obtaining clothing must also have increased, as the cloth used on the island was made of the plantain fibre. It is true that the cost of the fibre did increase, for the same reason that the cost of the fruit increased; but the cost of the cloth, that is, the number of hours of labour necessary from first to last to produce a piece of cloth, was