ce, the making of a single pin
involves eighteen separate operations, which are entrusted to eighteen
separate workmen; and the result is, that whereas one man working alone
could only make perhaps twenty pins in a day, several men working
together, on the principle of division of labour, can make several
thousands of pins per man in one day. Division of labour, in a highly
developed state of society, is carried into almost every practical art;
and its great benefits depend upon the increase of dexterity in each
workman, upon the saving of time otherwise lost in passing from one kind
of work to another, and finally, upon the use of many labour-saving
machines, which is made possible by the division of labour.

This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is
not originally the effect of any human wisdom which foresees and intends
the opulence to which it gives rise; it is rather the gradual result of
the propensity, in human nature, to barter and exchange one thing for
another. The power of exchanging their respective produce makes it
possible for one man to produce only bread, and for another to produce
only clothing. The extent to which the division of labour can be carried
is therefore limited by the extent of the market. There are some sorts
of industry, even of the lowest kind, which can be carried on nowhere
but in a great town; a porter, for example, cannot find employment and
subsistence in a village. In the highlands of Scotland every farmer must
be butcher, baker, and brewer for his own family.

As water-carriage opens a more extensive market to every kind of
industry than is afforded by land-carriage, it is on the sea coast and
on the banks of navigable rivers, that industry begins to subdivide and
improve itself, and it is riot till long afterwards that these
improvements extend to the inland parts. It was thus that the earliest
civilised nations were grouped round the coasts of the Mediterranean
Sea; and the extent and easiness of its inland navigation was probably
the chief cause of the early improvement of Egypt.

As soon as the division of labour is well established, every man
becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society becomes a commercial
society; and the continual process of exchange leads inevitably to the
origin of money. In the absence of money or a general medium of
exchange, society would be restricted to the cumbersome method of
barter. Every man therefore would e