Division of Labor and Specialization of Industry.— All of these things, the disposition of the densely populated countries to continue their growth of population by drawing foods from abroad and increasing their output of manufactures to pay therefor, and the disposi tion of the agricultural countries to continue their growth by increasing their output and ac cepting manufactures in exchange, means the application to world industries of that great economic law °The Division of Labor and Spe cialization of Industry.* Man long ago learned that this system would give better results in the operations of considerable groups of people under a single management. The manager of the successful factory divides the various proc esses required for producing the completed article among a large number of people or groups, but keeps each man or group of men steadily at the particular part of the work in which he has thus become especially expert. By this process of distributing the various parts of the proposed article to small groups of indi viduals and keeping each group continuously employed upon that particular part of the work, he increases the producing power of the factory and cheapens the cost of producing the articles being manufactured.
This system, of a division of labor and spe cialization of production, so successful in the operations of comparatively small groups of men, is now being applied, perhaps unconsci ously, to the production of the world, through the co-operation of cheap and, plentiful trans portation. Europe, the United States and Japan have become the world's great manufacturers and the agricultural, forestal and mineral areas in other sections of the globe have become the producers of food and manu facturing materials. As a result of the
distribution of labor and specialization of pro duction in the great world industries, the quan tity of the respective articles which each group of men can produce has been greatly enlarged and the cost of production, measured by man power, correspondingly reduced, while cheap ened transportation developed by another group of specially trained men enables the interchange of these articles at small cost.
As these great principles of division of labor and specialization of industry are ap plied from day to day to the world production of the staples required by man, they are being, little by little, extended to such new articles or industries as may be developed by the ingenuity of the human mind. The producing powers of the whole world are thus steadily increased, while the amount of man power required for the production and distribution of the respective products is being decreased by the same process of specialization.
As a result of these conditions, the division of labor, the specialization of production and the cheapening of transportation, the world to day is able to sustain a population double that of a century ago, with greater comfort, greater prosperity and a higher degree of intelligence than at that time. When we consider what has been done in this line in the last century, we may confidently expect that the world will be able to meet the requirements of such fur ther additions to its population as the future may bring.