l or administrative, or
for working on the land or for going to sea, or towards the more special
vocations of teaching or scholarship or the law or medicine or the cure
of souls. No one can estimate how large a share of the unhappiness
associated with our existing social system is due to the fact that,
owing to defects in our education and our arrangements for the choice of
employment, there are myriads of square pegs in round holes. This
applies with especial force to women, to whom many of the square holes
are still inaccessible, not simply owing to the lack of opportunities
for individuals, but owing to the inhibitions of custom and, in some
cases, to narrow and retrograde professional enactments. The war has
brought women their chance, not only in the office and the workshop,
but in higher administrative and organizing positions, and not the least
of its results is the revelation of undreamt-of capacities in these
directions.

In the second task, that of perfecting the adaptation between men and
their tools, we have much to learn from the industrial history of the
past. It is natural for men to enjoy 'talking shop', and this esoteric
bond of union has existed between workmen in all ages. We may be sure
that there were discussions amongst connoisseurs in the Stone Age as to
the respective merits of their flint axes, just as there are to-day
between golfers about niblicks and putters, and between surgeons as to
the technique of the extraction of an appendix. A good workman loves his
tools. He is indeed inseparable from them, as our law acknowledges by
forbidding a bankrupt's tools to be sold up. Give a good workman, in
town or country, a sympathetic listener and he is only too ready to
expatiate on his daily work. This sense of kinship between men and their
tools and material is so little understood by some of our modern expert
organizers of industry that it is worth while illustrating it at some
length. I make no apology, therefore, for quoting a striking passage
from an essay by Mr. George Bourne, who is not a trade unionist or a
student of Labour politics but an observer of English village life, who
has taken the trouble to penetrate the mind of what is commonly regarded
as the stupidest and most backward--as it is certainly the least
articulate--class of workmen in this country, the agricultural labourer
in the southern counties. 'The men', he writes,

are commonly too modest about their work, and too