(II) The “natural” organisation of the economic world under the influence of personal interest. (III) Liberalism. I: DIVISION OF LABOUR It was Quesnay who had propounded the theory that agriculture was the source of all wealth, both the State’s and the individual’s.[130] Adam Smith seized upon the phrase and sought to disprove it in his opening sentence by giving to wealth its true origin in the general activity of society. “The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.” Labour is the true source of wealth. When Smith propounded this celebrated theory, which has given rise to so many misunderstandings since, it was not intended that it should minimise the importance of natural forces or depreciate the part which capital plays in production.[131] No one, except perhaps J. B. Say, has been more persistent in emphasising the importance of capital, and to the land, as we shall presently see, he attributed a special degree of productivity. But from the very outset Smith was anxious to emphasise the distinction between his doctrine and that of the Physiocrats. So he definitely affirms that it is human activity and not natural forces which produces the mass of commodities consumed every year. Without the former’s directing energy the latter would for ever remain useless and fruitless. He is not slow to draw inferences from this doctrine. Work, employed in the widest sense, and not nature, is the parent of wealth—not the work of a single class like the agriculturists, but the work of all classes. Hence all work has a claim to be regarded as productive. The nation’s annual income owes something to everyone who toils. It is the result of their collaboration, of their “co-operation” as he calls it. There is no longer any need for the distinction between the sterile and the productive classes, for only the idle are sterile.