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