The Wealth of Nations

sufficient to make even a person of more than average intelligence a free-trader. Consequently it would be rash to suppose that Smith’s disbelief in the mercantile system was merely the natural outcome of his general belief in economic freedom. Dugald Stewart’s quotations from his paper of 1755 do not contain anything to show that he was pouring contempt on the doctrine before he left Edinburgh and in his early years at Glasgow. It seems very likely that the reference in the lectures to Hume’s “essays showing the absurdity of these and other such doctrines”95 is to be regarded as an acknowledgment of obligation, and therefore that it was Hume, by his Political Discourses on Money and the Balance of Trade in 1752, who first opened Adam Smith’s eyes on this subject. The probability of this is slightly increased by the fact that in the lectures the mercantile fallacies as to the balance of trade were discussed in connection with Money, as in Hume’s Discourses, instead of in the position which they would have occupied if Smith had either followed Hutcheson’s order, or placed them among the causes of the “slow progress of opulence.” It is, too, perhaps, not a mere coincidence that while both Hume in the Discourses in 1752 and Smith in his lectures ten years later rejected altogether the aim of securing a favourable balance of trade, Hume still clearly believed in the utility of protection for home industries, and Smith is at any rate reported to have made a considerable concession in its favour.96

It would be useless to carry the inquiry into the origin of Adam Smith’s views any further here. Perhaps it has been carried too far already. In the course of the Wealth of Nations Smith actually quotes by their own name or that of their authors almost one hundred books. An attentive study of the notes to the present edition will convince the reader that though a few of these are quoted at second hand the number actually used was far greater. Usually but little, sometimes only a single fact, phrase or opinion, is taken from each, so that few authors are less open than Adam Smith to the reproach of having rifled another man’s work. That charge has indeed never seriously been brought against him, except in regard to Turgot’s Réflections, and in that case not a particle of evidence has ever been produced to show that he had used or even seen the book in question. The Wealth of Nations was not written hastily with the impressions of recent reading still vivid on the author’s brain. Its composition was spread over at least the twenty-seven years from 1749 to 1776. During that period economic ideas crossed and recrossed the Channel many times, and it is as useless as it is invidious to dispute about the relative shares of Great Britain and France in the progress effected. To go further and attempt to apportion the merit between different authors is like standing on some beach and discussing whether this or that particular wave had most to do with the rising tide. One wave may appear to have what credit there is in sweeping over a child’s first sand castle and another wave may evidently wipe out his second, but both would have been swamped just as effectually, and almost as soon, on a perfectly calm day.

Introduction and Plan of the Work

The annual97 labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life98 which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.

According therefore, as this produce, or what is purchased with it, bears a greater or smaller proportion to the number of those who are to consume it, the nation will be better or worse supplied with all the necessaries and conveniencies for which it has occasion.99

But this proportion must in every nation be regulated by two different circumstances; first, by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied;100 and, secondly, by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so employed.101 Whatever be the soil, climate, or extent of territory of any particular nation, the abundance or scantiness of its annual supply must, in that particular situation, depend upon those two circumstances.

The abundance or scantiness of this supply too seems to depend more upon the former of those two circumstances than upon the latter. Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work, is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide, as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniencies of life, for himself, or102 such of his family or tribe as are either too old, or too young, or too infirm to go a hunting and fishing. Such nations, however, are so miserably poor, that from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or, at least, think themselves reduced, to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts. Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied, and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a