e needed, all merchants
are engaged. Without the store, the order upon the shelves, the ready
attendant and his despatch in meeting your demand, the pounds of sugar or
salt essential to your comfort could not be had for love or money. These
efforts are an essential part in the motion between wants and objects to
satisfy them. Much of this kind of motion we include under the name
commerce, though that word more directly implies the exchanges involved.
The machinery of commerce is chiefly the means of bringing things wanted
to the people who want them.

Much, however, of the exertion required in all industries, especially in
farming, is simply "to fetch and carry." It will emphasize this fact to
study, while you eat a piece of cherry pie, the processes involved in
bringing it from the treetop, grainfield, dairy and cane-field, through
mill and store and pantry and oven, to your plate. Transportation cuts a
tremendous figure in production of wealth. In the first stages of social
life it is almost the whole. The hunter talks of "bringing in" his game.
Australians, Hottentots and Digger Indians lived by carrying themselves
from one supply of food to another.

_Transformation in production._--Much of the material gathered by us needs
some change of form to suit our wants. An ax-helve has in it the original
wood of the young hickory brought from the forest, but its form is
fashioned by effort with ax, drawshave, scraper and sandpaper, until it
satisfies the judgment of an expert chopper. This transformation is
employed in any industries where wood, ivory, the metals and other
minerals are shaped by tools, or by molding, or pressing or bending, to
our wishes. Most fabrics are materials put into form. The word manufacture
covers most of such work where materials are manipulated by shaping; but
it also includes many operations with a different aim, to change the
substance itself.

_Transmutation in production._--Men have found that two metals, tin and
copper, melted together produce brass, different in qualities from either.
Farmers have for many centuries contrived, by keeping nature's forces
under control in the wheat field, to combine certain elements of the soil,
including its moisture, into grain. The single seed has multiplied a
hundredfold through being placed in favorable conditions, with the raw
materials at hand in the fertile soil.

The process of maintaining animals with suitable food for the production
of milk or