'SOCIAL EVOLUTION 247 



amongst civilized nations will be so deadly, so crushing 

 and so rapid, and moreover will so utterly disorganize 

 commerce, that it must soon exhaust itself. The 

 dominant or commanding factor in the future must be 

 commerce. The facts tend to the view that war is 

 becoming so terrible that even warriors fear the risk. 



International civilized society is tending to become 

 one concrete whole. 



While this civilization is progressing and it largely 

 is the result of division of labour this great faculty of 

 dividing labour to the utmost is producing a great evil. 

 Often the skilled worker is no longer finding himself 

 the master of his craft. He now has simply to do some 

 small departmental detail he becomes a part of a 

 huge machine. From the conditions of this system he 

 has to adapt himself to the machinery or throw himself 

 out of employ a victim of poverty and misery. 

 Progress therefore is adverse to such a class. How 

 little does it benefit by the division of labour ! A grow- 

 ing discontent is generating in the bosom of the skilled 

 artisan ; he finds as science and commerce divides and 

 sub-divides his position, he becomes more and more a 

 mere tool, always working at the same minute detail. 

 Side by side with this condition of things, with free 

 education, with a free press, he gets a larger expanse 

 of thought, but he finds his class progresses but little. 

 He works sullenly. He sees capital getting into fewer 

 hands, and capital becoming more despotic. 1 It cannot 



1 " We may state it, indeed, as a general law of a society based 

 upon wealth : that the misery of the labouring classes is directly pro- 

 portional to the luxury of the wealthy. This law is a very old one 

 indeed ; the only strange thing is that it is every day forgotten."- 

 (" Socialism, in Theory and Practice," " From the Ethic of Free- 

 thought," Karl Pearson, M.A., 1888, p. 361.) 



