This also can not be wholly true. “The founder of the cotton manufacture was a barber. The inventor of the power-loom was a clergyman. A farmer devised the application of the screw-propeller. A fancy-goods shopkeeper is one of the most enterprising experimentalists in agriculture. The most remarkable architectural design of our day has been furnished by a gardener. The first person who supplied London with water was a goldsmith. The first extensive maker of English roads was a blind man, bred to no trade. The father of English inland navigation was a duke, and his engineer was a millwright. The first great builder of iron bridges was a stone-mason, and the greatest railway engineer commenced his life as a colliery engineer.”[117]
(4.) The greatest advantage (next to the dexterity of the workmen) derived from the minute division of labor which takes place in modern manufacturing industry, is one not mentioned by Adam Smith, but to which attention has been drawn by Mr. Babbage: the more economical distribution of labor by classing the work-people according to their capacity. Different parts of the same series of operations require unequal degrees of skill and bodily strength; and those who have skill enough for the most difficult, or strength enough for the hardest parts of the labor, are made much more useful by being employed solely in them; the operations which everybody is capable of being left to those who are fit for no others.
The division of labor, as all writers on the subject have remarked, is limited by the extent of the market. If, by the separation of pin-making into ten distinct employments, forty-eight thousand pins can be made in a day, this separation will only be advisable if the number of accessible consumers is such as to require, every day, something like forty-eight thousand pins. If there is only a demand for twenty-four thousand, the division of labor can only be advantageously carried to the extent which will every day produce that smaller number. The increase of the general riches of the world, when accompanied with freedom of commercial intercourse, improvements in navigation, and inland communication by roads, canals, or railways, tends to give increased productiveness to the labor of every nation in particular, by enabling each locality to supply with its special products so much larger a market that a great extension of the division of labor in their production is an ordinary consequence. The division of labor is also limited, in many cases, by the nature of the employment. Agriculture, for example, is not susceptible of so great a division of occupations as many branches of manufactures, because its different operations can not possibly be simultaneous.
(5.) “In the examples given above the advantage obtained was derived from the mere fact of the separation of employments, altogether independently of the mode in which the separated employments were distributed among the persons carrying them on, as well as of the places in which they were conducted. But a further gain arises when the employments are of a kind which, in order to their effective performance, call for special capacities in the workman, or special natural resources in the scene of operation. There would be a manifest waste of special power in compelling to a mere mechanical or routine pursuit a man who is fitted to excel in a professional career; and similarly, if a branch of industry were established on some site which offered greater facilities to an industry of another sort, a waste, analogous in character, would be incurred. In a word, while a great number of the occupations in which men engage are such as, with proper preparation for them, might equally well be carried on by any of those engaged in them, or in any of the localities in which they are respectively established, there are others which demand for their effective performance special personal qualifications and special local conditions; and the general effectiveness of productive industry will, other things being equal, be proportioned to the completeness with which the adaptation is accomplished between occupation on the one hand and individuals and localities on the other.”[118]
§ 4. Production on a Large and Production on a Small Scale.
Whenever it is essential to the greatest efficiency of labor that many laborers should combine, the scale of the enterprise must be such as to bring many laborers together, and the capital must be large enough to maintain them. Still more needful is this when the nature of the employment allows, and the extent of the possible market encourages, a considerable division of labor. The larger the enterprise the further the division of labor may be carried. This is one of the principal causes of large manufactories. Every increase of business would enable the whole to be carried on with a proportionally smaller amount of labor.
As a general rule, the expenses of a business do not increase by any means proportionally to the quantity of business. Let us take as an example a set of operations which we are accustomed to see carried on by one great establishment, that of the Post-Office. Suppose that the business, let us say only of the letter-post, instead of being centralized in a single concern, were divided among five or six competing companies. Each of these would be obliged to maintain almost as large an establishment as is now sufficient for the whole. Since each must arrange for receiving and delivering letters in all parts of the town, each must send letter-carriers into every street, and almost every alley, and this, too, as many times in the day as is now done by the Post-Office, if the service is to be as well performed. Each must have an office for receiving letters in every neighborhood, with all subsidiary arrangements for collecting the letters from the different offices and redistributing them. To this must be added the much greater number of superior officers who would be required to check and control the subordinates, implying not only a greater cost in salaries for such responsible officers, but the necessity, perhaps, of being satisfied in many instances with an inferior standard of qualification, and so failing in the object.
Whether or not the advantages obtained by operating on a large scale preponderate in any particular case over the more watchful attention and greater regard to minor gains and losses usually found in small establishments, can be ascertained, in a state of free competition, by an unfailing test. Wherever there are large and small establishments in the same business, that one of the two which in existing circumstances carries on the production at greatest advantage will be able to undersell the other. The power of permanently underselling can only, generally speaking, be derived from increased effectiveness of labor; and this, when obtained by a more extended division of employment, or by a classification tending to a better economy of skill, always implies a greater produce from the same labor, and not merely the same produce from less labor; it increases not the surplus only, but the gross produce of industry. If an increased quantity of the particular article is not required, and part of the laborers in consequence lose their employment, the capital which maintained and employed them is also set at liberty, and the general produce of the country is increased by some other application of their labor.
A considerable part of the saving of labor effected by substituting the large system of production for the small, is the saving in the labor of the capitalists themselves. If a hundred producers with small capitals carry on separately the same business, the superintendence of each concern will probably require the whole attention of the person conducting it, sufficiently, at least, to hinder his time or thoughts from being disposable for anything else; while a single manufacturer possessing a capital equal to the sum of theirs, with ten or a dozen clerks, could conduct the whole of their amount of business, and have leisure, too, for other occupations.