confined themselves to these tasks who
might, strictly speaking, have aspired to higher things.

Is it a good thing in itself that some workers should, voluntarily or
not, confine themselves to the researches of critical scholarship? Yes,
without a doubt. In the study of history, the results of the division of
labour are the same as in the industrial arts, and highly
satisfactory--more abundant, more successful, better regulated
production. Critics who have been long habituated to the restoration of
texts restore them with incomparable dexterity and sureness; those who
devote themselves exclusively to investigations of authorship and
sources have intuitions which would not occur to others less versed in
this difficult and highly specialised branch; those who have spent
their lives in the construction of catalogues and the compilation of
_regesta_ construct and compile them more easily, more quickly, and
better than the man in the street. Thus, not only is there no special
reason for requiring every "historian" to be at the same time an active
worker in the field of critical scholarship, but even those scholars who
are engaged in the operations of external criticism come under different
categories. Similarly, in a stoneyard there is no point in the architect
being at the same time a workman, nor have all the workmen the same
functions. Although most critical scholars have not rigorously
specialised so far, and although they vary their pleasures by
voluntarily executing different kinds of critical work, it would be easy
to name some who are specialists in descriptive catalogues and indexes
(archivists, librarians, and the like), others who are more particularly
"critics" (purifiers, restorers, and editors of texts), and others who
are pre-eminently compilers of _regesta_. "The moment it is admitted
that erudition is only valuable for the sake of its results, it becomes
impossible to carry the division of scientific labour too far;"[109] and
the progress of the historical sciences corresponds to the narrower and
narrower specialisation of the workers. It was possible, not very long
ago, for the same man to devote himself successively to all the
operations of historical inquiry, but that was because he appealed to a
not very exacting public: nowadays we require of those who criticise
documents a minute accuracy and an absolute perfection which presuppose
real professional skill. The historical sciences have now reached a
s