, gone nearly so far. Every country does a certain amount
of farming and of seafaring (if it has a seaboard), and of
manufacturing. But the tendency has been towards increasing
specialization, and the last results of specialization, if carried to
its logical end, are not nice to forecast. "It is not pleasant," wrote a
distinguished statistician, "to contemplate England as one vast factory,
an enlarged Manchester, manufacturing in semi-darkness, continual uproar
and at an intense pressure for the rest of the world. Nor would the
continent of America, divided into square, numbered fields, and
cultivated from a central station by electricity, be an ennobling
spectacle."[7]

It need not be said that the horrible consequences of specialization
depicted by Dr. Bowley need not necessarily have happened, even if its
effects has been given free play. But the interesting point about his
picture, at the present moment, is the fact that it was drawn from the
purely economic and social point of view. He questioned whether it was
really to the advantage of a nation, regarding only its own comfort and
well-being, to allow specialization to go beyond a certain point. It
had already arrived at a point at which land was going out of
cultivation in England, and was being more and more regarded as a park,
pleasure ground and sporting place for people who made, or whose
forbears had made, fortunes out of commerce and finance, and less and
less as a means for supplying food for our workers, and raw material for
our industries. The country workers were going to the new countries that
our capital was opening up, or into the towns to learn industrial
crafts, or taking services as gamekeepers, grooms or chauffeurs, with
the well-to-do classes who earned their profits from industry or
business. Even before the war there was a growing scarcity of labour to
grow, and harvest, even the lessened volume of our agricultural output.
Dr. Bowley's picture was far from being realized and even if the process
of specialization had gone on, it may be hoped that we should have had
sense enough to avoid the blackest of its horrors.

Then came the war, which went far to undermine the great underlying
assumption on which the free interchange of capital among nations and
the consequent specialization that proceeded from it, was taken to be a
safe and sound policy. This assumption was in effect, that the world was
civilized to a point at which there was no need to