Excerpt from The Armies of Labor, Vol. 40 Three momentous things symbolize the era that begins its cycle with the memorable year of 1776: the Declaration of Independence, the steam engine, and Adam Smith's book, The Wealth of Nations. The Declaration gave birth to a new nation, whose millions of acres of free land were to shift the eco nomic equilibrium of the world; the engine mul tiplied man's productivity a thousandfold and up rooted in a generation the customs of centuries; the book gave to statesmen a new View of econom ic affairs and profoundly influenced the course of international trade relations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.