2 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



divisions again so minute, indeed, that the modern 

 ideal of a workman seems to be a man or a woman, 

 or even a girl or a boy, without the knowledge of any 

 handicraft, without any conception whatever of the 

 industry he or she is employed in, who is only capable 

 of making all day long and for a whole life the same 

 infinitesimal part of something: who from the age of 

 thirteen to that of sixty pushes the coal cart at a 

 given spot of the mine or makes the spring of a pen- 

 knife or " the eighteenth part of a pin ". Mere ser- 

 vants to some machine of a given description ; mere 

 flesh-and-bone parts of some immense machinery ; 

 having no idea how and why the machinery performs its 

 rhythmical movements. 



Skilled artisanship is being swept away as a sur- 

 vival of a past condemned to disappear. For the 

 artist who formerly found aesthetic enjoyment in the 

 work of his hands is substituted the human slave of an 

 iron slave. Nay, even the agricultural labourer, who 

 formerly used to find a relief from the hardships of his 

 life in the home of his ancestors the future home of 

 his children in his love of the field, and in a keen 

 intercourse with nature, even he has been doomed to 

 disappear for the sake of division of labour v __lfeis 

 an anachronism we are told : he must be substituted, 

 in a Bonanza farm, by an occasional servant hired for 

 the summer, and discharged as the autumn comes : 

 a tramp who will never again see the field he has 

 harvested once in his life. " An affair of a few years," 

 the economists say, " to reform agriculture in accord- 

 ance with the true principles of division of labour and 

 modern industrial organisation." 



Dazzled with the results obtained by our century 

 of marvellous inventions, especially in England, our 

 economists and political men went still farther in 

 their dreams of division of labour. They proclaimed 

 the necessity of dividing the whole of humanity into 



