An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations | Page 6

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 of

all the different branches of labour employed in agriculture, is perhaps the reason why the
improvement of the productive powers of labour, in this art, does not always keep pace
with their improvement in manufactures. The most opulent nations, indeed, generally
excel all their neighbours in agriculture as well as in manufactures ; but they are
commonly more distinguished by their superiority in the latter than in the former. Their
lands are in general better cultivated, and having more labour and expense bestowed upon
them, produce more in proportion to the extent and natural fertility of the ground. But this
superiority of produce is seldom much more than in proportion to the superiority of
labour and expense. In agriculture, the labour of the rich country is not always much
more productive than that of the poor ; or, at least, it is never so much more productive,
as it commonly is in manufactures. The corn of the rich country, therefore, will not
always, in the same degree of goodness, come cheaper to market than that of the poor.
The corn of Poland, in the same degree of goodness, is as cheap as that of France,
notwithstanding the superior opulence and improvement of the latter country. The corn of
France is, in the corn-provinces, fully as good, and in most years nearly about the same
price with the corn of England, though, in opulence and improvement, France is perhaps
inferior to England. The corn-lands of England, however, are better cultivated than those
of France, and the corn-lands of France are said to be much better cultivated than those of
Poland. But though the poor country, notwithstanding the inferiority of its cultivation,
can, in some measure. rival the rich in the cheapness and goodness of its corn, it can
pretend to no such competition in its manufactures, at least if those manufactures suit the
soil, climate, and situation, of the rich country. The silks of France are better and cheaper
than those of England, because the silk manufacture, at least under the present high duties
upon the importation of raw