the food supply. The society therefore
will not be in what has now become its standard shape till men have
been moved from the wheat-raising subgroup to others.

If the invention of the reaper were not followed by any others and if
no other disturbing changes took place, labor would move from the one
group, distribute itself among others, and bring the system to a new
equilibrium; but it has not time to do this. It begins to move in the
way that the new condition occasioned by the introduction of the
reaping machine impels it to move; but before the transfer is at all
complete there is a new invention somewhere else in the system that
starts a movement in some other direction. Before the labor from _A_
is duly distributed in _B_, _C_, etc., there is an invention in _B_
which starts some of it toward other points.

_Why Movements are Perpetual as well as Changeful._--Such improvements
are perpetual, and the dynamic society is not for an instant at rest.
If the disturbing causes would cease, the elements of the social body
would find their abiding place; and the important fact is that at any
one instant there is such a resting place for each laborer and each
bit of capital in the whole system. As we have seen, the men and the
productive funds would go to these points but for the fact that before
they have time to reach them new disturbances occur that call them in
new directions. Again and again the same thing occurs, and there is no
opportunity for placing labor and capital at exactly the points to
which recent changes call them before still further improvements begin
to call them elsewhere.

_Why Technical Changes are more disturbing than a General Influx or
Efflux of Population._--When the moving of labor is gradual, it is
effected, not so much by transferring particular men from one
occupation to another, as by diverting the young men who are about
entering the field of employment to the places where labor is most
needed. When the son of a shoemaker, instead of learning his father's
trade, becomes a carpenter, no _laborer_ has abandoned an accustomed
occupation and betaken himself to another; but _labor_ has gone from
the shoemaking trade to that of carpentering. A man often stays where
he is to the end of his life, although during that life labor has
moved freely out of his occupation to others. If we represent the
facts by a diagram, they will stand thus:--

A B C D

50 40 70 100 Na