Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/82

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

may directly affect hundreds of workmen and thousands of consumers. The boy who receives the penny receives many other pennies, a portion of which accrues to him as his profit from the sale of the papers. The greater portion goes with hundreds of other pennies, from each of hundreds of other boys, to the office of the newspaper, where they form a considerable portion of the fund that pays for the paper whereon, and the ink, type, and presses wherewith, the newspaper is printed; that goes in wages and salaries to the foreman, compositors, correspondents, and editors. The portion of this fund that goes to the manufacturers of ink, paper, and presses contributes to their profits and to the wages and salaries of the workmen employed by them. Portions of the wages and salaries of foreman, compositors, correspondents, and editors, and of the workmen that make ink, paper, and presses, are in turn paid by them to dealers in shoes, hats, clothes, meat, flour and potatoes, coal, furniture, carpets, and so on. The dealers in these commodities make remittances to the manufacturers who in turn, pay the wages of the workmen who produce shoes, hats, and clothes; to the killers of cattle; the packers and shippers of meat; the raisers of wheat and millers of flour; the miners of coal; the makers of furniture, and the weavers of carpets. Each is a purchaser of products that all are concerned in producing. The money that goes to each as a reward for his efforts is distributed through various channels to all others as a portion of the reward for their efforts. The exchange of the penny and the paper between the man and the newsboy is one of a myriad of exchanges between man and man that are interlinked one with the other in bringing to each a portion of the benefit of the efforts of all the others, and which, giving a broad significance to the term, constitute Business.

Without this interlinking of effort the fabric of our civilization would be impossible. Not under any conceivable conditions could any one family supply its needs as those needs are supplied by the various producing and distributing agencies of to-day.

With the increasing interdependence of man and man in ministering to material needs has been an increasing tendency toward association for that satisfaction which is obtained from the common enjoyment of a pleasure, the sharing of grief, the expression and exchange of thought and opinion, from social conversation. Association, from necessity or convenience, frequently develops a similarity of taste and habit that brings congeniality; the wider the range of association permitted by the conditions of their lives, the greater is the opportunity for persons of particular tastes and habits to form companionships affording the greatest gratification, and the likelihood that they will do so. With the congeniality thus formed is the growth of sympathy of one