isted on bringing round
bad epics instead of bread and the grocer bad sonatas instead of sugar,
the supply, however good it might seem to the baker and the grocer, and
however much satisfaction they might personally have derived from their
work, would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper, acting on
behalf of the household, would not take it in. But if the demand was for
something not yet available, but less impossibly remote than the moon,
the housekeeper might persuade the purveyors to cudgel their brains till
they had met the need. For, as we know, Necessity, which is another word
for Demand, is the mother of invention. Similarly, if a purveyor
supplied something undreamed of by the household, but otherwise good of
its kind, he might succeed in persuading the household to like it--in
other words, in creating a demand. The late Sir Alfred Jones, by putting
bananas cheap on the market, persuaded us that we liked them. Similarly
Mr. Marvin, who deals in something better than bananas, has persuaded us
all to come here, though most of us would never have thought of it
unless he had created the demand in us.

Economic Progress, then, is progress both on the side of demand and on
the side of supply. It is a progress in wants as well as in their means
of satisfaction: a progress in the aspirations of the household as well
as in the contrivances of its purveyors: a progress in the sense of what
life might be, as well as in the skill and genius and organizing powers
of those to whom the community looks for help in the realization of its
hopes. It is important that this double aspect of our subject should be
realized, for in what follows we shall have no opportunity to dwell
further upon it. Space compels us to leave the household and its wants
and aspirations out of account and to direct our attention solely to the
side of supply; although it must always be remembered that no real and
permanent progress in the organization of production is possible without
improvements in the quality and reduction in the number of the
requirements of what is called civilization.[68] What we have to watch,
in our study of progress in industry, is the history of man as a
purveyor of the household: in other words, as a producer of goods and
services: from the days of the primitive savage with his bark canoe to
the gigantic industrial enterprises of our own time.

We can best do so by dividing our subject into two on somewhat similar
lin