ill quickly become universal and
that the practical arts in America, Africa, and Asia will be rendered
uniform by such a quick adoption of the most efficient processes as
economic law, in the absence of friction, requires.

_Boundaries of the Society which is here Studied._--If we take the
world as a whole into the circle covered by our studies, we find that
labor, compared with other economic elements, decidedly lacks fluidity
and does not easily move. So far from being like water, which flows
readily and finds its level quickly, it is more like tar or other
viscous stuff, which flows slowly and is long in leveling out local
irregularities in its surface. In the world as a whole there are
regions crowded with people and other regions nearly unpeopled, and
long will it be before some of these differences will be much reduced.
Many centuries, indeed, must pass before they are entirely removed.
If, however, we take the most active part of the world,--western
Europe, most of North America, Japan, and the more fully settled parts
of Australia,--labor will show a degree of mobility that makes it more
like the water of the illustration, and capital within this active
center of industrial operations will be more fluid still. Prices here
tend toward certain general standards, and processes of production and
methods of organizing the forces which do the producing work tend
strongly toward uniformity. The best processes and the best forms of
organization tend generally to survive. There are imperative reasons
for studying the economy of this highly civilized region, the center
of the economic activities of the world, apart from that of the more
undeveloped regions.[1]

[1] This is far from implying that economic laws do not work
in the excluded outer area or that no effects are produced
within the central area by causes that originate in the outer
zone. How these things take place we shall later see.

_The Need of a Rule by which a Part of the World may be Treated as an
Economic Society._--This involves finding a way by which we can treat
a limited part of the world much as though it were, for our purposes,
the whole of it. In essential ways the economic center that we have
described does act somewhat as if it were an organism complete in
itself. We must draw a boundary line about the area of active
movement, of lively interchanges, and of general sensitiveness to
economic influences, thus separating it from th