day, now that all live under conditions of health and comfort, has shrunk
to scarcely perceptible proportions, and with every generation is becoming more
completely eliminated.
    Another item wherein we save is the disuse of money and the thousand
occupations connected with financial operations of all sorts, whereby an army of
men was formerly taken away from useful employments. Also consider that the
waste of the very rich in your day on inordinate personal luxury has ceased,
though, indeed, this item might easily be over-estimated. Again, consider that
there are no idlers now, rich or poor, - no drones.
    A very important cause of former poverty was the vast waste of labor and
materials which resulted from domestic washing and cooking, and the performing
separately of innumerable other tasks to which we apply the coöperative plan.
    A larger economy than any of these - yes, of all together - is effected by
the organization of our distributing system, by which the work done once by the
merchants, traders, storekeepers, with their various grades of jobbers,
wholesalers, retailers, agents, commercial travelers, and middlemen of all
sorts, with an excessive waste of energy in needless transportation and
interminable handlings, is performed by one-tenth the number of hands and an
unnecessary turn of not one wheel. Something of what our distributing system is
like you know. Our statisticians calculate that one eightieth part of our
workers suffices for all the processes of distribution which in your day
required one eighth of the population, so much being withdrawn from the force
engaged in productive labour.«
    »I begin to see,« I said, »where you get your greater wealth.«
    »I beg your pardon,« replied Dr. Leete, »but you scarcely do as yet. The
economies I have mentioned thus far, in the aggregate, considering the labor
they would save directly and indirectly through saving of material, might
possibly be equivalent to the addition to your annual production of wealth of
one-half its former total. These items arc, however, scarcely worth mentioning
in comparison with other prodigious wastes, now saved, which resulted inevitably
from leaving the industries of the nation to private enterprise. However great
the economies your contemporaries might have devised in the consumption of
products, and however marvelous the progress of mechanical invention, they could
never have raised themselves out of the slough of poverty so long as they held
to that system.
    No mode more wasteful for utilizing human energy could be devised, and for
the credit of the human intellect it should be remembered that the system never
was devised, but was merely a survival from the