17200 Essays 3
clothed and better lodged. And if, instead of employing
 a man I feed in making bricks, I employ him
in fiddling for me, the corn he eats is gone, and no
part of his manufacture remains to augment the
wealth and convenience of the family; I shall therefore
 be the poorer for this fiddling man, unless the
rest of my family work more, or eat less, to make up
the deficiency he occasions.
Look around the world and see the millions employed
 in doing nothing, or in something that
amounts to nothing, when the necessaries and conveniences
 of life are in question. What is the bulk
of commerce, for which we fight and destroy each
other, but the toil of millions for superfluities, to the
great hazard and loss of many lives by the constant
dangers of the sea? How much labor is spent in
building and fitting great ships, to go to China and
Arabia for tea and coffee, to the West Indies for
sugar, to America for tobacco? These things cannot
 be called the necessaries of life, for our ancestors
lived very comfortably without them.
A question may be asked: Could all these people
now employed in raising, making, or carrying superfluities
 be subsisted by raising necessaries? I think
they might. The world is large, and a great part of
it still uncultivated. Many hundred millions of acres
in Asia, Africa, and America are still in a forest, and
a great deal even in Europe. On a hundred acres of
this forest a man might become a substantial farmer,
and a hundred thousand men, employed in clearing
each his hundred acres, would hardly brighten a spot
big enough to be visible from the moon, unless with

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