An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of NationsSmith, Adam
General
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Smith, Adam
Economics
were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the
necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make
among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound
upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons,
therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in
a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight
thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred
pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently,
and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business,
they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one
pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth,
perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth, part of what they are at
present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and
combination of their different operations.
In every other art and manufacture, the effects of the division of
labour are similar to what they are in this very trifling one, though,
in many of them, the labour can neither be so much subdivided, nor
reduced to so great a simplicity of operation. The division of labour,
however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a
proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour. The
separation of different trades and employments from one another, seems
to have taken place in consequence of this advantage. This separation,
too, is generally carried furthest in those countries which enjoy the
highest degree of industry and improvement; what is the work of one man,
in a rude state of society, being generally that of several in an
improved one. In every improved society, the farmer is generally nothing
but a farmer; the manufacturer, nothing but a manufacturer. The labour,
too, which is necessary to produce any one complete manufacture, is
almost always divided among a great number of hands. How many different
trades are employed in each branch of the linen and woollen
manufactures, from the growers of the flax and the wool, to the
bleachers and smoothers of the linen, or to the dyers and dressers of
the cloth! The nature of agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many
subdivisions of labour, nor of so complete a separation of one business
from another, as manufactures. It is impossible to separate so entirely
the business of the grazier from that of the corn-farmer, as the trade
of the carpenter is commonly separated from that of the smith. The
spinner is almost always a distinct person from the weaver; but the
ploughman, the harrower, the sower of the seed, and the reaper of the
corn, are often the same. The occasions for those different sorts of
labour returning with the different seasons of the year, it is
impossible that one man should be constantly employed in any one of
them. This impossibility of making so complete and entire a separation
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