d we see the emergence of the
sterile female worker. But is such a change--or any change at all of
that kind--to be desired?

_The Terms of Specialization._--It surely cannot be denied that there
may be a grave antagonism between the interests of the society and those
of the individual. It is a question of the terms of specialization or
differentiation. In the study of the individual organism and its history
we discern specialization of the cell as a capital fact. Organic
evolution has largely depended upon what Milne-Edwards called the
"physiological division of labour." In so far as organic evolution has
been progressive, it has entirely coincided with this process of
cell-differentiation. That is the clear lesson which the student of
progress learns from the study of living Nature. Let him hold hard by
this truth, and by it let him judge that other specialization which
human society presents.

For this primary and physiological division of labour has its analogue
in a much later thing, the division of labour in human society, upon
which, indeed, the possibility of what we call human society depends.
And it is plain that the time has come when we must determine the price
that may rightly be paid for this specialization. Assuredly it is not to
be had for nothing. Dr. Minot considers that death, as a biological
fact, is the price paid for cell-differentiation. Now surely the death
of individuality is the price paid for such specialization as that of
the workman who spends his life supervising the machine which effects a
single process in the making of a pin, and has never even seen any
other but that stage in the process of making that one among all the
"number of things" of which the world is full. Here, as in a thousand
other cases, it has cost a man to make an expert.

How far we are entitled to go we shall determine only when we know what
it is that we want to attain.

If we desire an efficient, durable, numerous society, there are probably
no limits whatever that we need observe in the process of
specialization. Pins are cheaper for the sacrifice of the individual in
their making. In general, the professional must do better than the
amateur; the lover of chamber music knows that a Joachim or Brussels
Quartet is not to be found everywhere. Specialization we must have for
progress, or even for the maintenance of what the past has achieved for
us; but we shall pay the right price only by remembering the principle