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the right place," or, as Cicero long ago perfectly expressed it: Ad quas res aptissimi erimus, in iis potissimum elaborabimus-"We shall be choosing for our occupation the employments for which we are best fitted."

In order to attain to division of labour between geographical regions, we must apply free trade between the different countries. From each of these we should demand the products for which nature has given it special advantages: tea from China, coffee from Brazil and Java, iron from England, wine from France, wheat from the black lands of the Danube and of Russia, from the United States cotton, from India rice. In this way mankind in general will obtain the most abundant satisfaction of its needs in exchange for the smallest amount of effort. Division of labour when applied to the whole globe makes all men partners in the universal workshop from which there issues the ever-increasing welfare of mankind.

Alarm has been felt at the consequences of the division of the details of labour. What is to become of the workman who shall devote his whole life to making pins' heads? This was the indignant question evoked by Adam Smith's now classic illustration. This idea is elaborated by Tocqueville with his usual profundity. "In proportion," he writes, "as the principle of the division of labour receives more complete application, the workman will become more and more feeble, limited, and dependent. If art

progress, the artisan will retrograde. The employer will approach ever more nearly to the administrator of a great empire, the workman to the condition of a brute. The difference between them will increase every day" (La Démocratie en Amérique, vol. ii. p. 20). Happily the fears Tocqueville expresses have not been realised.

The division of labour cannot be carried very far in agriculture, inasmuch as the tasks to be performed, the sowing and reaping, succeed one another. Yet the agricultural labourer is far from being more intelligent than the manufacturing; and it is in manufactures where the division of details is pushed to an extreme, in the making of watches and fire-arms, for instance, that the most intelligent workmen are to be met. It is very fortunate that this is the case, since the workman must never be sacrificed to the perfecting of the work, inasmuch as the goal to be attained is the improvement and welfare of the human race, and not the mere increase of wealth.

Nowadays, however, specialisation seems carried too far. He who works with his hands should be left some leisure for head-work; and he who works with his head should have some hours for manual labour. Thus Mr. Gladstone cuts down trees, and Lincoln, the President of the United States, used to chop wood. To insure health both of body and mind, both the one and the other must be given proper food and exercise.

The advantages of the division of labour were remarked by the ancients. Plato, Xenophon, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus all speak of them. Plato praises the Egyptians for having always intrusted the same kind of work to the same workman, thereby making him more skilful; and we read in his Republic (book ii.): “Would things go better if each man had several crafts, or if each confined himself to his own? Obviously, if each man confined himself to his own."

The following passage from the Cyropædia shows that Xenophon perfectly understood the advantages of the division, and even of the sub-division, of labour, as well as the causes which occasion or restrict it. "In small cities the same workman makes beds, doors, ploughs, and furniture; and often even builds the houses. A workman occupied with so many tasks cannot succeed equally well in all. In a large town, on the other hand, where a number of the inhabitants have the same needs, a single craft will suffice for an artisan's support. Sometimes even he will only exercise one part of this craft, as when one shoemaker makes soles for men and another for women; or one gains a livelihood by stitching them, another by cutting them out. According to the nature of things a man whose toil is limited to a single kind of work will excel in this kind."

§ 18. Influence of Science Applied to Manufacture on the Productiveness of Labour,

Virgil sang, Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas "Happy is he who has knowledge of the causes of things," and, in very truth, the better he knows them the better he will be able to profit by them to his own advantage. In the words of Bacon, "Knowledge is power," or as the French philosopher, Victor Cousin, expresses it: "In intelligence we have the primitive capital which contains and produces all others."

Nothing contributes more to increase the productiveness of labour than the application to it of science, that is to say of observation of the facts and laws of nature. Of this the history of economic progress furnishes a proof at every step.

Primitive man observes that in the forest two dry branches when rubbed against each other by the wind, ignite. Imitating the operations of nature he bores a hole in a piece of light, dry wood, and in this hole turns the point of a piece of very hard wood rapidly round till a flame shoots up. Here we have the discovery of fire, perhaps the greatest which man has ever made, a discovery which at once raised him above the level of the animals. Of the point of wood he has made an emblem to be worshipped, and of the flame a supernatural power among the Aryans the god Agni. The Prometheus of the Greeks, who stole fire from

heaven, is the Pramatha of primitive India, the point of wood the rotation of which creates the flame (from the Sanskrit root math, "to rub "). At Rome the sacred fire was kept up by the vestals, and the same is the case in Peru. It may only be relighted by means of the friction of sticks of wood.

A man picks up a flint and makes it into a hatchet. With this tool in his hand he sallies forth to conquer the world, as do the American squatters to this day. Later on he observes that a bent branch, with its two ends tied with a string, possesses an elastic force which hurls a dart to a long distance. Here we have him armed with a bow, with which he procures much more game than with the boomerang-the sole weapon known to the Australians and to prehistoric men. Again, he sees a tree floating on the water, and concludes that by hollowing it out he can place himself in it and move along the surface of the waves. He does so, and navigation is invented. Once more he perceives that by fashioning the pieces of stone with which he meets into particular shapes, he can use them to hollow wood and to wound and kill animals; he thus makes himself knives, saws, and javelin heads, either in flint or obsidian. After a long interval of time he learns the use of metals, and replaces these tools and weapons of stone, at first by copper and bronze, afterwards by iron. In this way, after an

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