DIVISION OP LABOUR 491 



the same reply as an appeal to the individual reason. The ele- 

 ments of society which are condemned to suffer as the result of 

 the division of labour which calls upon them to perform the 

 less interesting and less remunerative tasks, have no " social " 

 interests to serve in maintaining such a state of afiairs ; their 

 social instincts must coincide with their individual instincts, 

 and both must urge them to create social conditions from which 

 this division of labour is excluded. 



Every man, it is said — we think that M. Bourgeois, the former 

 Prime Minister of France, was the first to "say it — is bound by 

 certain obUgations to society, which constitute a sort of semi- 

 contract. Every man is a debtor to society for the progress, 

 both material and intellectual, which has been achieved before 

 his time. But, in the first place, while we do not dispute that 

 civihsation has produced great material and intellectual progress, 

 we have to ask whom this progress has most greatly bene- 

 fited ? Has the working man derived as great a benefit from 

 the invention of the steam-engine, or the telegraph, or the 

 automobile as the capitaUst ? Has he, more especially, de- 

 rived great benefit from the scientific work of Darwin or from 

 the genius of Wagner ? And if we grant that the economic 

 conditions to-day are largely to blame for the biological de- 

 terioration observable in modem civihsation, it would, never- 

 theless, be folly to attempt to remedy these by the introduction 

 of conditions which would infringe the primordial law of hfe — 

 that of expansion. But if we are thus compelled to retain such 

 conditions as the division of social work, which is essential to all 

 social hfe beyond a certain degree of evolution, we shall always 

 have a certain amount of hfe which will be sacrificed in accordance 

 with this condition. It is not only the division of labour itself, 

 it is also the condition, more fundamental still, of natural 

 inequahty which requires a certain amount of sacrifice. This 

 inequahty is a law of Nature. True ; but you cannot expect the 

 victims of this sacrifice to recognise the necessity for it, unless 



