for these purposes, may be well adapted for
producing other commodities. A large variety of alternative uses will
enable us to get the largest net amount of utilities out of Nature,
and a community which, in lieu of an extension of demand for the same
commodities, asserts its civilisation in the education of new demands
and a greater complexity in the standard of its comfort, may draw
from the land an indefinite increase of wealth without putting forth
more labour or paying higher rent. It is simply one more example of
the economy attainable by division of labour and specialisation of
function.

Sec. 14. What applies to food will equally apply to the use of the earth
for providing the raw material of all other forms of material wealth.
A people with growing variety of consumption is ever finding new and
more profitable uses for slighted or neglected capacities of nature.
The social progress of nations must be chiefly determined by the
amount of their intelligent flexibility of consumption. Mere variety
of consumption in itself is not sufficient to secure progress. There
must be a progressive recognition of the true relations, between the
products which can be most economically raised upon each portion of
the soil, and the wholesome needs of mankind seeking the full
harmonious development of their faculties in their given physical
environment. A progressive cultivation of taste for a variety of
strong drinks, though it might provide an increased number of
alternative uses for the soil, and might enhance the aggregate
market-values of the wealth produced, would not, it is generally held,
make for social progress. That nation which, in its intelligent
attainment of a higher standard of life, is able to thoroughly
assimilate and harmonise the largest variety of those products for
which their soil and climate are best adapted, will be foremost in
industrial progress and in the other arts of civilisation which spring
out of it.

The case is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our
material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the
limits of the material universe, for such variety enables him to
utilise a larger proportion of the aggregate of matter. But in
proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those
adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, and which we call
Art, we pass outside the limits of matter and are no longer the slaves
of roods and acres and a law of dimi