WEALTH OF NATIONS. 153 



Economists, falls into some of their most erroneous views. 

 He regards agriculture as wholly different from manufac- 

 tures, because nature here works with man, and adds to 

 the amount of his possessions. But the powers of nature 

 are as much required to aid us in a chemical, nay, even in 

 a mechanical process, as in agriculture. The fermenta- 

 tion of grains to distil a beer or a spirit from them is as 

 much an operation of nature as the germination of the 

 seeds to grow the crop ; it is as impossible for man to 

 augment the quantity of matter in tilling the ground, as 

 in working up the produce ; all he does in either case is 

 to new-mould, and to fashion ; and the rude produce is 

 as useless before he manufactures it, as the water, the 

 salts, and the gaseous bodies, of which vegetables consist, 

 are useless before the process of vegetation. The differ- 

 ence in trades which replace foreign, and those which 

 replace home capitals, is better founded, although the 

 sounder view is to consider all nations which interchange 

 each other's commodities as one great community, and 

 to regard the gain of each, even by the labour which 

 the capital of any other puts in motion, and by the 

 accumulation of profits which thence arises, as the gain 

 more or less directly of that other; thus extending the 

 doctrine of the division of labour to the whole community 

 of nations, upon which doctrine we have seen depends the 

 refutation of the errors respecting productive and unpro- 

 ductive labour in the case of any one nation. 



III. The different progress of wealth in different 

 nations forms the subject of the third book, which there- 

 fore treats in four successive chapters, first, of the na- 

 tional progress of opulence, by the cultivation of the 

 country, and then by the improvement of the towns ; 



