to cultivate and bring to perfection whatever talent or genius he may possess for that particular species of business.” Division of labour is the outcome of a tendency common to all men, the tendency to barter; and this tendency itself is spontaneously developed under the influence of personal interest, which acts simultaneously for the benefit of each and all. Next comes money, and nothing has so facilitated exchange or so greatly increased wealth. Every economic treatise since Smith’s has demonstrated its advantages in terms almost identical with his. But how did money first come to be employed? It was not by the act of a public body, nor was it the outcome of a nation’s reflective judgment. It is simply the result of the operation of a collective instinct. Some men who were keener than others saw the inconveniences of the truck system. And “in order to avoid the inconveniency of such situations, every prudent man in every period of society, after the first establishment of the division of labour, must naturally have endeavoured to manage his affairs in such a manner, as to have at all times by him, besides the peculiar produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some one commodity or other, such as he imagined few people would be likely to refuse in exchange for the produce of their industry.”[162] Money is thus the product of the simultaneous though not concerted action of a great number of people, each obeying his personal inclination. The intervention of the public authority is much later, and its object is merely to guarantee by means of a design the weight and purity of such coins as are already in circulation. Take another well-known phenomenon—capital.[163] With the exception of division of labour and the invention of money, Smith thought there was no phenomenon of greater importance and no more essential fount of national wealth than capital. The larger the store of capital, the greater the number of productive workers, makers of tools and machinery—the essentials of increased productivity—the further will division of labour extend. To increase a nation’s capital is to expand its industry and to further its well-being.[164] In some passages the growth of wealth appears not merely as the chief but as the only method of augmenting a nation’s wealth. “The industry of the society can augment only in proportion as its capital augments, and its capital can augment only in proportion to what can be gradually saved out of its revenue.”[165] In short, capital limits industry,[166] a phrase that was destined to become classic, and one that was repeated by every economist down to Mill. Capital is the true source of economic life. Let capital increase and industry will expand in every direction; diminish it and a bar is set to all improvement. Capital fertilises the earth, whereas the labour of man simply leaves it a weary waste.