Supply and Demand | Page 3

world,
that cooperation is of a boundless range and an indescribable
complexity. Yet it is essentially undesigned and uncontrolled by man.
The humblest inhabitant of the United States or Great Britain depends
for the satisfaction of his simplest needs upon the activities of
innumerable people, in every walk of life and in every corner of the
globe. The ordinary commodities which appear upon his dinner table
represent the final product of the labors of a medley of merchants,
farmers, seamen, engineers, workers of almost every craft. But there is
no human authority presiding over this great complex of labor,
organizing the various units, and directing them towards the common
ends which they subserve. Wheel upon wheel, in a ceaseless succession
of interdependent processes, the business world revolves: but no one
has planned and no one guides the intricate mechanism whose smooth
working is so vital to us all. Man, indeed, can organize and has
organized much. Within a large factory the efforts of thousands of
work-people, each engaged on the repetition of a single small process,
are fitted together so as to form an ordered whole by the conscious
direction of the management. Sometimes factory is joined with factory,
with farms, fisheries, mines, with transport and distributing agencies, as
one gigantic business unit, controlled by a common will. These giant
businesses are remarkable achievements of man's organizing gifts. The
individuals who control them wield an immense power, which so
impresses the public imagination that we dub them "kings,"
"supermen," "Napoleons of industry." But how small a portion of man's
economic life is dominated by such men! Even as regards the affairs of

their own businesses, how narrow, after all, are the limits of their
influence! The prices at which they can buy their materials and borrow
their capital, the quantities of their products which the public will
consume, are factors at once vital to their prosperity and outside their
own control.
A great business, like a nation, may cherish visions of self-sufficiency,
may stretch its tentacles forward to the consumer and backwards to its
supplies of raw material; but each fresh extension of its activities serves
only to multiply its points of contact with the outside world. When
those points are reached, the largest business, like the smallest, is out
on the open sea of an economic system immeasurably larger and more
powerful than itself. There it must meet--the better perhaps for its
inherent strength and accumulated knowledge--the impact of rude
forces, which it is powerless to control. Beneath the blasts of a trade
depression, or some other tendency of world-wide scope, the authority
of the mightiest industrial magnate, and equally of any Government,
assumes the same essential insignificance as the pride of a man
humbled by contact with the elemental powers of nature.
§3. The Existence of Order. The parallel can be pursued further with
advantage. Just as in the world of natural phenomena, which for long
seemed to man so wayward and inexplicable, we have come gradually
to perceive an all-pervading uniformity and order; so there is manifest
in the economic world, uniformity, order, of a similar if less majestic
kind. Upon the cooperation of his fellowmen, man depends for the very
means of life: yet he takes this cooperation for granted, with a
complacent confidence and often with a naive unconsciousness, as he
takes the rising of to-morrow's sun. The reliability of this unorganized
cooperation has powerfully impressed the imagination of many
observers.
"On entering Paris which I had come to visit," exclaimed Bastiat some
seventy years ago, "I said to myself--Here are a million of human
beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind
ceased to flow towards this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled
when it tries to appreciate the vast multiplicity of commodities which

must enter to-morrow through the barriers in order to preserve the
inhabitants from falling a prey to the convulsions of famine, rebellion,
and pillage. And yet all sleep at this moment, and their peaceful
slumbers are not disturbed for a single instant by the prospect of such a
frightful catastrophe. On the other hand, eighty departments have been
laboring to-day, without concert, without any mutual understanding, for
the provisioning of Paris."
The theme may well excite wonder. But wonder should always be
watched with a wary eye; for he is apt to bring in his train a hanger-on
called worship, who can do nothing but mischief here. It is a short step
from a passage like that quoted above to a glorification of the existing
system of society, to a defence of all manner of indefensible things; and
a cross-grained attitude towards all projects of reform. It is a short step;
but it is one which it is quite unjustifiable to take. For the evils of our