arts, any improved application of the objects or powers of nature to industrial uses, enables the same quantity and intensity of labor to raise a greater produce. One principal department of these improvements consists in the invention and use of tools and machinery.114
The deficiency of practical good sense, which renders the majority of the laboring-class such bad calculators—which makes, for instance, their domestic economy so improvident, lax, and irregular—must disqualify them for any but a low grade of intelligent labor, and render their industry far less productive than with equal energy it otherwise might be. [pg 101] The moral qualities of the laborers are fully as important to the efficiency and worth of their labor as the intellectual. Independently of the effects of intemperance upon their bodily and mental faculties, and of flighty, unsteady habits upon the energy and continuity of their work (points so easily understood as not to require being insisted upon), it is well worthy of meditation how much of the aggregate effect of their labor depends on their trustworthiness.
Among the secondary causes which determine the productiveness of productive agents, the most important is Security. By security I mean the completeness of the protection which society affords to its members.
§ 2. Combination and Division of Labor Increase Productiveness.
In the enumeration of the circumstances which promote the productiveness of labor, we have left one untouched, which is co-operation, or the combined action of numbers. Of this great aid to production, a single department, known by the name of Division of Labor, has engaged a large share of the attention of political economists; most deservedly, indeed, but to the exclusion of other cases and exemplifications of the same comprehensive law. In the lifting of heavy weights, for example, in the felling of trees, in the sawing of timber, in the gathering of much hay or corn