1 86 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



to some happy circumstances, they have succeeded in 

 acquiring some scientific knowledge, and thus they have 

 combined science with handicraft Surely there are 

 such men; happily enough there is a nucleus of men 

 who have escaped the so-much-advocated specialisa- 

 tion of labour, and it is precisely to them that industry 

 owes its chief recent inventions. But in old Europe 

 at least, they are the exceptions ; they are the irregulars 

 the Cossacks who have broken the ranks and pierced 

 the screens so carefully erected between the classes. 

 And they are so few, in comparison with the ever- 

 growing requirements of industry and of science as 

 well, as I am about to prove that all over the world we 

 hear complaints about the scarcity of precisely such 

 men. 



What is the meaning, in fact, of the outcry for 

 technical education which has been raised at one and 

 the same time in England, in France, in Germany, 

 in the States, and in Russia, if it does not express a 

 general dissatisfaction with the present division into 

 scientists, scientific engineers, and workers? Listen 

 to those who know industry, and you will see that 

 the substance of their complaints is this : " The worker 

 whose task has been specialised by the permanent 

 division of labour has lost the intellectual interest in 

 his labour, and it is especially so in the great industries : 

 he has lost his inventive powers. Formerly, he in- 

 vented very much. Manual workers not men of sci- 

 ence nor trained engineers have invented, or brought 

 to perfection, the prime motors and all that mass of 

 machinery which has revolutionised industry for the 

 last hundred years. But since the great factory has 

 been enthroned, the worker, depressed by the monotony 

 of his work, invents no more. What can a weaver 

 invent who merely supervises four looms, without know- 

 ing anything either about their complicated movements 

 or how the machines grew to be what they are ? What 



