production.

It is quite true that wheelbarrows and carts, wagons and ships, may be
increased indefinitely; but of what use can they possibly be, unless
the things to be carried be first produced, and whence can those
things be obtained except from the earth? The grist-mill is useful,
provided there is grain to be ground, but not otherwise. The
cotton-mill would be useless unless the cotton was first produced.
Agriculture _must_ precede manufactures, and last of all, says Dr.
Smith, comes foreign commerce.[139]

The reader has had before him a passage from Mr. J.S. Mill, in which
that gentleman says that "if the law [of the occupation of the land]
were different, almost all the phenomena of the production and
distribution of wealth would be different from what they now are." In
the days of Adam Smith it had not yet been suggested that men began by
the cultivation of rich soils, and then passed to poor ones, with
constantly diminishing power to obtain food. Population, therefore,
had not come to be regarded as "a nuisance" to be abated by any
measures, however revolting, and imposing upon Christian men the
necessity of hardening their hearts, and permitting their fellow-men
to suffer every extremity of poverty and distress "short of absolute
death," with a view to bring about a necessity for refraining to
gratify that natural inclination which leads men and women to
associate in the manner tending to promote the growth of numbers and
the development of the best feelings of the human heart. It was then
considered right that men and women should marry, and increase of
population was regarded as evidence of increased wealth and strength.
Dr. Smith, therefore, looked at the affairs of the world as they were,
and be saw that the production of commodities not only preceded their