other elements; to which diminution it is impossible at present to assign any limit.
It follows that the exchange values of manufactured articles, [pg 483] compared with the products of agriculture and of mines, have, as population and industry advance, a certain and decided tendency to fall. Money being a product of mines, it may also be laid down as a rule that manufactured articles tend, as society advances, to fall in money price. The industrial history of modern nations, especially during the last hundred years, fully bears out this assertion.
In regard to manufactures, as opposed to raw products, it is to be remarked “that, as the course of price in the field of raw products is, on the whole, upward, so in that of manufactured goods the course is, not less strikingly, in the opposite direction. The reasons of this are exceedingly plain. In the first place, division of labor—the first and most powerful of all cheapeners of production, but for which there is in extractive industry but very limited scope—finds in manufacturing industry an almost unbounded range for its application; and, secondly, it is in manufacturing industry also that machinery, the other great cheapener of production, admits of being employed on the largest scale, and has, in fact, been employed with the most signal success. It follows at once from these facts, taken in connection with the further fact that industrial invention does not take place per saltum, but gradually—one invention ever treading on the heels of another—and that its advance seems to be subject to no limitation; it follows, I say, from these considerations, that that portion of the cost of manufactured goods which properly belongs to the manufacturing process must, with the progress of society, undergo constant diminution.... In all the great branches of manufacturing industry the portion of the cost incurred in