on, and the exchange of goods and
services, all the things that were needed by man were made much better
and more cheaply, but this was only brought about at the expense of each
man's versatility. Nowadays we can all of us do something very much
better than the primitive savage, but we cannot do everything nearly as
well. We have become little insignificant wheels in a mighty great
machine that feeds us and clothes us and provides us with comforts and
luxuries of which he could never have dreamt. He was the whole of his
machine, and was thereby a far more completely developed man. The modern
millionaire, in spite of his enormous indirect power over the forces of
nature, is a puny and ineffective being by the side of his savage
ancestor, in the matter of power to take care of himself with his own
hands and feet and eyes, and with weapons made by his own ingenuity and
cunning. Moreover, though in the case of the millionaire and of all the
comparatively well-to-do classes we can point to great intellectual and
artistic advantages, and many pleasant amenities of life now enjoyed by
them, thanks to the process of specialization, these advantages can only
be enjoyed to the full by comparatively few. To the majority
specialization has brought a life of mechanical and monotonous toil,
with little or none of the pride in a job well done, such as was enjoyed
by the savage when he had made his bow or caught his fish; those who
work all day on some minute process necessary, among many others, to
the turning out of a pin, can never feel the full joy of achievement
such as is gained by a man who has made the whole of anything. Pins are
made much faster, but some of the men who make them remain machines, and
never become men at all in the real sense of the word. And when at the
same time the circumstances of their lives, apart from their work, are
all that they should not be--bad food, bad clothes, bad education, bad
houses, foul atmosphere and dingy and sordid surroundings, it is very
obvious that to a large part of working mankind, the benefits of the
much vaunted division of labour have been accompanied by very serious
drawbacks. The best that can be said is that if it had not been for the
division of labour a large number of them could never have come into
existence at all; and the question remains whether any sort of existence
is better than none.

In the case of a nation the process of specialization has not, for
obvious reasons