Principles of Political Economy: Abridged with Critical, Bibliographical, and Explanatory Notes, and a Sketch of the History of Political Economy
John Stuart Mill · en
(3.) The third advantage attributed by Adam Smith to the division of labor
is, to a certain extent, real. Inventions tending to save labor in a
particular operation are more likely to occur to any one in proportion as
his thoughts are intensely directed to that occupation, and continually
employed upon it.
This also can not be wholly true. “The founder of the cotton
manufacture was a barber. The inventor of the power-loom was a
clergyman. A farmer devised the application of the
screw-propeller. A fancy-goods shopkeeper is one of the most
enterprising experimentalists in agriculture. The most remarkable
architectural design of our day has been furnished by a gardener.
The first person who supplied London with water was a goldsmith.
The first extensive maker of English roads was a blind man, bred
to no trade. The father of English inland navigation was a duke,
and his engineer was a millwright. The first great builder of iron
bridges was a stone-mason, and the greatest railway engineer
commenced his life as a colliery engineer.”(117)
(4.) The greatest advantage (next to the dexterity of the workmen) derived
from the minute division of labor which takes place in modern
manufacturing industry, is one not mentioned by Adam Smith, but to which
attention has been drawn by Mr. Babbage: the more economical distribution
of labor by classing the work-people according to their capacity.
Different parts of the same series of operations require unequal degrees
of skill and bodily strength; and those who have skill enough for the most
difficult, or strength enough for the hardest parts of the labor, are made
much more useful by being employed solely in them; the operations which
everybody is capable of being left to those who are fit for no others.