lf from the right, unless left-handed. Schopenhauer despaired of
the German race, because it could never be taught like the English to
keep to the right side of the pavement in walking. A sword is worn at
the left hip: a handkerchief is carried in the right pocket, if at the
side; in the left, if in the coat-tails: in either case for the right
hand to get at it most easily. A watch-pocket is made in the left
breast; a pocket for railway tickets half-way down the right side. Try to
reverse any one of these simple actions, and you will see at once that
they are immediately implied in the very fact of our original
right-handedness.

And herein, I think, we find the true answer to Charles Reade's mistaken
notion of the advantages of ambidexterity. You couldn't make both hands
do everything alike without a considerable loss of time, effort,
efficiency, and convenience. Each hand learns to do its own work and to
do it well; if you made it do the other hand's into the bargain, it
would have a great deal more to learn, and we should find it difficult
even then to prevent specialisation. We should have to make things
deliberately different for the two hands--to have rights and lefts in
everything, as we have them now in boots and gloves--or else one hand
must inevitably gain the supremacy. Sword-handles, shears, surgical
instruments, and hundreds of other things have to be made right-handed,
while palettes and a few like subsidiary objects are adapted to the
left; in each case for a perfectly sufficient reason. You can't upset
all this without causing confusion. More than that, the division of
labour thus brought about is certainly a gain to those who possess it:
for if it were not so, the ambidextrous races would have beaten the
dextro-sinistrals in the struggle for existence; whereas we know that
the exact opposite has been the case. Man's special use of the right
hand is one of his points of superiority to the brutes. If ever his
right hand should forget its cunning, his supremacy would indeed begin
to totter. Depend upon it, Nature is wiser than even Charles Reade. What
she finds most useful in the long run must certainly have many good
points to recommend it.

And this last consideration suggests another aspect of right and left
which must not be passed over without one word in this brief survey of
the philosophy of the subject. The superiority of the right caused it
early to be regarded as the fortunate, lucky, and trusty