Nothing can be more incorrect, though it is frequently done, than to regard Smith as the prophet of industrialism and to contrast him with the Physiocrats, the champions of agriculture. When the _Wealth of Nations_ appeared in 1776 the economic transformation known to history as the Industrial Revolution, which consisted in the rapid substitution of machine production for the old domestic _régime_, had as yet scarcely begun. Hargreaves and Arkwright had doubtless some inventions to their credit. The one had produced the spinning jenny in 1765, and the other had perfected the water frame in 1767, improvements that had given considerable impetus to the cotton trade. James Watt,[148] who was known to Smith, took out a patent for a steam-engine in 1769. But these inventions were as yet quite novel, and required time before they could modify the industrial system. The more important among them, Crompton’s “mule”[149] and Cartwright’s weaving machine, were as yet of the future. These dates are significant; they prove conclusively that the Industrial Revolution had scarcely begun when Smith’s great work appeared. Moreover, several of the more important themes treated of in the _Wealth of Nations_ may be discovered in the course of lectures which Smith delivered at Glasgow about 1759, so that it is quite impossible to establish anything like an exact connection between the Industrial Revolution which was just beginning and the ideas embodied in the _Wealth of Nations_. One cannot even say that Smith was particularly enamoured of the manufacturing _régime_—apart from the mechanical advance which it implied. For, as Marx says,[150] the characteristic trait of English economic life, despite the undisputed advance that industry was making at that time, was commercial rather than industrial.[151] Especially was this true of Glasgow, where Smith made most of his observations. Glasgow then was an essentially commercial town, principally engaged in the importation of American tobacco.[152] Far from constituting a prophetic manifesto of the new age, Smith’s work reveals even to the most superficial reader a thorough abhorrence of traders and manufacturers. All his sarcasm is reserved for them, all his criticism levelled at them. While the interest of landed proprietors and workers appears to him always to accord with a country’s general interest, that of traders and manufacturers “is never exactly the same with that of the public,” the manufacturers having “generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”[153]