Book I: Chapter 1 - Page 2

into the paper ; and the important business of making a pin is, in
this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some
manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the
same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small
manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some
of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though
they 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