menced its work. The price of books now continually decreases. The
gains of the imitators diminish in proportion as the invention becomes
older; and in the same proportion imitation becomes less meritorious.
Soon the new object of industry attains its normal condition; in other
words, the remuneration of printers is no longer an exception to the
general rules of remuneration, and, like that of copyists formerly, it
is only regulated _by the general rate of profits_. Here then the
producer, as such, holds only the old position. The discovery,
however, has been made; the saving of time, labor, effort, for a fixed
result, for a certain number of volumes, is realized. But in what is
this manifested? In the cheap price of books. For the good of whom?
For the good of the consumer--of society--of humanity. Printers,
having no longer any peculiar merit, receive no longer a peculiar
remuneration. As men--as consumers--they no doubt participate in the
advantages which the invention confers upon the community; but that is
all. As printers, as producers, they are placed upon the ordinary
footing of all other producers. Society pays them for their labor, and
not for the usefulness of the invention. _That_ has become a
gratuitous benefit, a common heritage to mankind.

The wisdom and beauty of these laws strike me with admiration and
reverence.

What has been said of printing, can be extended to every agent for the
advancement of labor--from the nail and the mallet, up to the
locomotive and the electric telegraph. Society enjoys all, by the
abundance of its use, its consumption; and it _enjoys all
gratuitously_. For as their effect is to diminish prices, it is
evident that just so much of the price as is taken off by their
intervention, renders the production in so far _gratuitous_. There
only remains the actual labor of man to be paid for; and the
remainder, which is the result of the invention, is subtracted; at
least after the invention has run through the cycle which I have just
described as its destined course. I send for a workman; he brings a
saw with him; I pay him two dollars for his day's labor, and he saws
me twenty-five boards. If the saw had not been invented, he would
perhaps not have been able to make one board, and I would none the
less have paid him for his day's labor. The _usefulness_, then, of the
saw, is for me a gratuitous gift of nature, or rather, is a portion of
the inheritance which, _in common_ with my br