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perhaps more useful or agreeable in the wear. But the effect to the poor will be to increase their comforts; it will give them the means of procuring a more ample stock of useful and comfortable clothing, and of clothing which is really better and more agreeable in the use. "The war against machinery, is a war against human enjoyments." It is a war of extermination, a treason against the species; for our machinery is the only means by which our high-wrought husbandry can be maintained, and food and clothing procured for our augmented population.

Though we cannot at present foresee the extent to which machinery may be carried, or the degree in which it may be brought to supersede the labour of the hands, it is impossible that machinery can ever supersede labour altogether. Machinery will not work alone; it must be directed and superintended by labour; its operation is not to supersede altogether, but to assist the labour of the hands. But though the extent to which it may be carried should be greater than we can imagine, there is no cause for apprehension therefrom: there is nothing very alarming in the prospect of an exemption from labour. With every step in the advancement of machinery the quantity of the products of industry must be greater than labour previously could yield; the limit of cultivation will be pushed forward upon poorer soils, and the numbers of mankind that may be thus supported in plenty must consequently be increased. We may venture to affirm, that the increased knowledge, by which alone discoveries and inventions to abridge labour can be made, will be a knowledge not restricted to physical causes alone, but will extend likewise to moral causes. The different departments of knowledge have a mutual connexion with one another: the advancement of one kind helps on the progress of other kinds. We may expect that if the physical sciences advance, the moral will not lag behind; that the institutions of society will become ameliorated, poverty less general and less abject, wealth more diffused, and less concentrated in enormous masses; that a greater simplicity of manners will prevail, with an increase of benevolence and philanthropy; that the augmented production of machinery will be accompanied by a decrease in the voracious consumption of the products of industry, which a pampered

luxury and an ostentatious pride and vanity induce in the rich; and the produce of labour or machinery serve for the comfortable subsistence of a greater number of individuals.

CHAPTER VIII.

ON THE DIVISION OF EMPLOYMENTS.

THE vastly greater efficiency of labour in civilized than in savage life, and the superior condition of man which is so strikingly visible when we compare him in the cultivated and the uncultivated state, are in great part owing to the division and combination of employments.

Co-operation with distinct departments of labour assigned to separate individuals is peculiar to human beings. It is this which gives them power. If all mankind had continued in that primeval state in which every species of work was performed by each man for himself, the world at this day would have still remained in the extreme of barbarism and poverty. The useful arts could never have been known, and the earth in all its parts would not have been more fully peopled than we find it is in those poor and savage countries where the division of labour and the operations of the arts are alike unknown

Man was happily formed with an inclination for society, and was led at a very early period of his history to perceive, amongst other advantages resulting from association, that he acquires dexterity of hand in the performance of his labour, by confining himself to one single occupation. Most probably, peculiar and distinct occupations were introduced at first from private, and not from public, views. Individuals found that they could perform certain kinds of work better than other kinds, and gain a better livelihood by following exclusively one or a few occupations, than many. But though peculiar trades and professions were probably embraced at first from private interest, they became afterwards established by public authority, from

views of the general good. Amongst some of the ancient nations an opinion seems to have prevailed, that labour was best performed, not only when the attention of the workman was confined to one particular branch of exertion, but also when he became habituated to it in early infancy. On this principle, probably, the institutions of some countries caused occupations to be hereditary; as was the case in ancient Egypt, in some parts of India, and in Peru. The mischief of forcing hereditary occupations on the people is, however, so great, that it is matter of lamentation that a principle so valuable when kept within proper limits, should have been extended till it became injurious. It has been thought that the institution of caste, which establishes hereditary occupation, has been one powerful cause of the stationary condition in which the people of India have remained during so many ages; and that this people will never be roused from their apathy to make any material progress, until this institution shall be abrogated or greatly relaxed.

Previous to the time of Dr. Adam Smith, the division of labour had been noticed by some of the modern political writers, as one of the principal means by which the wealth of nations has been most advanced. But it was left for him to trace at large the consequences resulting from it, and to place it in that prominent position which it is really entitled to hold. This he has done in so able a manner as to command the assent of all subsequent writers. Some of his often-quoted remarks on this subject are so forcible that, I trust, they will bear to be again repeated, in preference to the expression of the same ideas in other and less appropriate language of my own.

"The effects of the division of labour, in the general business of society, will be more easily understood, by considering in what manner it operates in some particular manufactures. It is commonly supposed to be carried furthest in some very trifling ones; not perhaps that it really is carried further in. them than in others of more importance: but in those trifling manufactures which are destined to supply the small wants of but a small number of people, the whole number of workmen must necessarily be small; and those employed in every different branch of the work can often be collected into the same work

house, and placed at once under the view of the spectator. In those great manufactures, on the contrary, which are destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people, every different branch of the work employs so great a number of workmen, that it is impossible to collect them all into the same workhouse. We can seldom see more at one time than those employed in one single branch. Though in such manufactures, therefore, the work may really be divided into a much greater number of parts, than in those of a more trifling nature, the division is not near so obvious, and has accordingly been much less observed.

"To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker: a workman not educated to this business, (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade,) nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it, (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion,) could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them 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!

In speaking of the division of employment, we comprehend in that expression its combination also. When the production of an article is effected by many workmen, each performing a separate


* Wealth of Nations, Book I. ch. 1.

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