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As the miner must employ various manufacturing processes tvtransmute his mineral into a purer metal, or other marketableshape, he may, without much violence, be classed with the ma-nufacturer ; and, as fishing seldom adds materially to the gene-ral means of subsistence procured by agriculture in a nation anyway populous, and enjoying any considerable extent of territoryfit for culture, the fisher may, in a general classification, be as-sorted with the agriculturist. The two great prominent divi-sions, then, into which the industrious population of an exten-sive political community fall generally to be arranged, are theAgricultural and the Mamifacturing.
These two great classes, it is evident, are the mutual consum-ers of each other’s productions. The manufacturer must dependon the cultivator of the soil for his food, as well as for most ofthe materials of his manufacture; and, as he cannot expect tobe subsisted gratuitously upon the bounty of the cultivator, hecan only propose to receive food, as au equivalent, or in ex-change for, manufactured produce. The cultivator, on the o-tlier hand, could have no inducement to raise more food than hecould consume himself, unless he had the pTospect of exchang-ing it for something which he values as an equivalent; and wecannot suppose, that the mere pleasure of feeding idle peopleshould be considered as constituting such an equivalent. Thecultivator, therefore, after supplying himself with the means ofsubsistence, disposes of his surplus produce to the manufacturer,in exchange for the conveniencies of life ; and the manufacturer,after supplying himself with conveniencies, must still farther pro-duce a surplus, to be exchanged against food. These conveni-encies and necessaries seldom meet, in the simple exchange ofbarter: the surplus of both may be immediately exchanged a-gainst money ; but money itself is of no value, but in as far aiit can command, in exchange, these necessaries or convenien-cies : so that though money may be the universal medium of ex-change, yet every transaction of exchange must, ultimately, re-solve itself into the simple barter of necessaries against conve-niencies.
As capital increases, and exchanges are enlarged, a third classarises, whose industry and capital are employed (to the great ad-vantage of the other two primary classes), in negotiating theirexchanges for them, leaving each to pursue, with undivided at-tention, their respective occupations, and to accumulate a stillgreater quantity of exchangeable surplus, the produce of theirrespective employments. This class comprehends the mercantileor trading interest, whose business it is, as wholesale or retailmerchants, to collect the surplus produce of the two classes otagriculturists and manufacturers ; replacing to each that capita*which they had laid out ip obtaining that surplus, and to be i* 1readiness to furnish to each, that portion of the other’s surplu*