profitable commerce that can be maintained,--as the reader may satisfy
himself if he will reflect that when the miller and the farmer are
near neighbours they divide between them all the flour that is made,
whereas, when they are widely separated, a third man, the carrier,
intervenes between them and takes a large portion of it, leaving less
to be divided between those who raise the wheat and those who convert
it into flour. The more perfect the power of association the greater
must be the power to maintain commerce, for _every act of association
is an act of commerce_, as it is proposed now to show, beginning at
the beginning, in the family, which long precedes the nation. Doing
so, we find the husband exchanging his services in the raising of food
and the materials of clothing, for those of his wife, employed in the
preparation of food for the table, and the conversion of raw materials
into clothing,--and here it is we find the greatest of all trades. Of
all the labour employed on the farms and in the farm-houses of the
Union, we should, could we have an accurate statement, find that the
proportion of its products exchanged beyond their own limits, scarcely
exceeded one-third, and was certainly far less than one-half, the
remainder being given to the raising of food and raw materials for
their own consumption, and the conversion of that food and those
materials into the forms fitting them for their own uses.

At the next step we find ourselves in the little community, of which
the owner of this farm constitutes a portion; and here we find the
farmer exchanging his wheat with one neighbour for a day's labour--the
use of his wagon and his horse for other days of labour--his potatoes
with a third for the shoeing of his horse, and with a fourth for the
shoeing of himself and his children, or the making of his coat. On one
day he or his family have labour to spare, and they pass it off to a
neighbour to be repaid by him in labour on another day. One requires