3

Those socialists who never tire of preaching "association," overlook for the most part, the great, free association which our needs, wants or tastes are ever changing, and which is given us, as of course, by the division of labor.1 Yet the skill produced by the division of labor is unavoidably connected with a corresponding one-sidedness. The Russians, for instance, are exceedingly apt, but they rarely distinguish themselves in any thing. Love of his avocation, or pride in it, is a thing unknown to the Russian workman. He shirks all continuous labor. Experience has shown that the Neapolitans and Italians, in general, exhibit great skill when they work alone; but that when a great many of them work together, they become rapidly confused. The English, on the other hand, are slow to learn anything new, or to overcome unlooked for difficulties; but they have no equals as workmen in organized industries. The difficulty experienced in seeking a new calling, where a high division of labor obtains, arises as much from the fact that each person here has received a more onesided training, as from the necessity he is under of competing from the first with only consummate workers. Rousseau's school has laid too much stress on the tendency of higher civilization to diminish individual independence. Quand on sait creuser un canot, battre l'ennemi, construire une cabane, vivre de peu, faire cent lieues dans les forêts sans autre guide que le vent ct le soleil, sans autre provision qu'un arc et des flèches; c'est

'Thus, for instance, that all the customers of a shoemaker together form a shoe-association etc. Dunoyer, Liberté du Travail, L. IV, ch. 10.

Storch, Handbuch, III, 188 ff. The Dutch traveler, Usselinx, speaks in a similar way of the imitativeness and many-sidedness of the Swedes (Argonautica Gustavica, 20). Chilian servants (peones) are a good combination of the cook, the muleteer, builder, courier etc. Once they have passed over a road, they never forget it. A knife stands them in stead of most tools, and pieces of leather in stead of nails. Pöppig, Reise, I, 171 ff.

3 von Haxthausen, Studien, I, 63, 113. In 1827, a Russian hatter got 12 rubles for a hat, a German one 35 (Schön, N. Œkonomie, 78).

See the report of a large manufacturer in Kohl, England und Wales, p. 332 seq.

alors qu'on est un homme!5 We might reply that to build a steamship or a palace, and to travel around the world are far better. (Dunoyer.) Even physically, civilized man is superior to the savage, as might be inferred from the greater average duration of life of the former. Of course, extremes should not be compared, nor should we contrast the frame of a weaver or student with that of a savage chief.

In a similar way, the one-sidedness of the international division of labor may be pregnant with great danger to national independence.

SECTION LXIII.

DARK SIDE OF THE DIVISION OF LABOR.-ITS GAIN AND LOSS.

Where, indeed, the one-sidedness produced by the division. of labor goes so far as to cause the degeneration1 of the workman's personality, the human loss of the nation is greater than

5

Raynal, Histoire des Indes (1780), L. XV. And so Rousseau, Discours sur l' Inegalité (1754), who also declaims against all kinds of capital; were there no ladders, men would climb better; and throw a stone better if they had no slings. There is certainly a misunderstood truth in this saying. It is assuredly very salutary, in the actual state of society, in which every one's business is transacted for him by some one else, that a time should occasionally come when no one can take our place, and a man can only call upon himself. And herein lies the immense value which just war, when not much prolonged, but which is brought to a happy termination, sometimes has upon the life of a people.

"The American savages are, on an average, weaker than the whites. In a fist-fight the Kentuckians and Virginians showed themselves far superior to the Indians. See Lawrence, Lectures, 403, supra, § 40.

1 For a very unprejudiced estimate of the dark and bright sides of the division of labor, even before Adam Smith's time, see Ferguson, History of of Civil Society (1767), IV, I, V, 3 ff. Also Garve, Versuche, III, 41. Adam Smith was not blind to the dark side of the division of labor, which, in part, he would remove by popular instruction at the expense of the state, and by a One of the species of compulsory education. W. of N., V, ch. 1, 3, art. 2. chief peculiarities of J. Möser's Political Economy is his great opposition to all highly developed division of labor. Patr. Ph., I, 2, 21, III, 32, 34.

the material gain purchased by it. Thus the occupation of polishing metals or gilding, when continued for a long time without interruption, invariably ruins the health. What must be the aspect of the soul of a workman who, for forty years has done nothing but watch the moment when silver has reached the degree of fusion which precedes vaporization! who is blind to all else, but receives a good fat salary for his services.? Schleiermacher rightly declared all human action which is purely mechanical, through which man becomes a living tool, (slave!) immoral. When the division of labor has reached this point, machines should take the place of men. The morality of a profession may be measured by the degree in which it corresponds with the universal calling of the race. It is not, therefore, a piece of inconsistency but rather a deeply felt want, when, where civilization is at its highest, so many demands are made that the division of labor should take a retrograde path. The practice of gymnastic exercises by the sedentary classes, universal military duty, the participation of citizens in municipal government and in political affairs, of laymen in the government of the church, of the wealthy in the administration of charity; all these things are, from a materialistic stand-point, considered a great squandering of time. It may be, that, if the division of labor were more rigidly car

2 von Ledebur, Reise in Altai, I, 384. The working together of wife and child, introduced recently by manufacturers, cannot be considered as a higher grade of the division of labor, but only as a very unfavorable change in the kind of it; inasmuch as it were better to employ the women in their domestic avocations and to leave children to their studies and their sports. Among the higher classes, it should be made the part of female education, to counterbalance, in the family, the effects of the ever increasing division of labor among the male portion, by the development of that which is universally

3 Schleiermacher, Christliche Sitte, 465 ff., 676 ff., 154 ff. From a similar feeling, although much exaggerated, the Greeks of the classic age proper considered all callings followed for gain dishonorable, not excepting even those of the physician and of the teacher. Plato, de Rep., I, 347 ff. Aristot., Rhet, I, 9, 27: μηδεμίαν ἐργάζεσθαι βάναυσον τέχνην, ἐλευθέρον γὰρ τὸ μὴ πρὸς ἄλλον ζην.

ried out, we might, by its means, obtain more perfect results with less economic expense. But the whole man is of more importance than the sum of his achievements and enjoyments. (Luke, 9:25.) Wo to the nation where only jurists have a developed sense of the right, where political judgment and cultivated patriotism are the portion of only officials and placemen, where only the standing army has warlike courage, and the clergy only conscious religiousness; where parents leave all care for education to the teachers of the various branches of learning, and where physical vigor is to be found only among the proletarians. Hence there is nothing more ruinous than premature one-sided education in a single trade or profession—a thing which often happens from poverty before the foundations of the general education becoming a human being have been laid. The higher a man's position, the more should he, so to speak, be a representative of the whole human race. Who, for instance, would wish to see a ruler brought up as men are to a special branch of science or to a special profession?45 The best corrective for the one-sided

4 As, for instance, the superintendent of a manufactory must have a better general training, but can get along with less of a special, than his workmen. 5 Thucydides says of the contemporaries of Pericles: "The same men devote themselves, among us, in part to domestic and political business; in part, others who busy themselves with agriculture and industy have no mean knowledge of the affairs of state. We call those who take no part in the former not people loving their ease, but useless men.” (II, 40.) During the succeeding period, Athens was destroyed mainly by the ever increasing division of labor between citizens and soldiers. For, "to separate the arts which form the citizen and the statesman, the arts of policy and war, is an attempt to dismember the human character, and to destroy those very arts we mean to improve." (Ferguson.) We know from Valerius Maximus, that the Roman soldiers from the time of Marius had, doubtless, a better technic training than their ancestors who who defeated Hannibal; but was it in a military or political sense that they were thus better trained? The beautiful definition of Cato intimates something of the same nature; the good orator was vir bonus dicendi peritus. (Quintilian, XII, I.) And so Garve, Versuche, IV, 51 ff., expects from the political elevation of citizenship, of those possessed of the right of citizens, not only usefulness in a particular direction but the development of the whole man, a thing hitherto expected only of the nobility.

ness produced by a high division of labor consists in the extension and many-sided employment of leisure time, both of which are made more easy by the same high civilization which always accompanies the division of labor."

SECTION LXIV.

THE CO-OPERATION OF LABOR.

The coöperation or combination1 of labor must, however, always correspond to the division of labor. Both are but different sides of the one idea of social labor; the separation of different kinds of labor, in so far as they would disturb one another, and the union or combination of them so far as they help one another. The vintner or grower of flax would neces

As one's peculiar calling does not take up all his life, we must draw a clear distinction between the one-sidedness of labor and the one-sidedness of life. (von Mangoldt, Volkswirthschaftslehre, 227.) Only the last is to be avoided at all hazards; and we find it in the middle ages, with its limited divisions of labor, perhaps more frequently than where civilization has attained a higher stage. During the middle ages, it was not unusual to make feelings which every one should cultivate at times, if only temporarily, the lasting calling of some, Thus one prayed his whole life long, or was engaged in contemplation, and relieved others of the necessity of performing these duties. The consequence was, that the latter sank as deeply in worldliness and want of the interior spirit as the former were plunged in idleness and hypocrisy. But, on the other hand, when, in our day, the printer relieves the writer of a portion of the labor which might be his, the personal development of neither suffers.

1L'uomo è un' tal potenza, che unita all' altra non fa un eguale alla somma, ma al quadrato della somma. (Genovesi.) As to how the action of every individual man is a species of division and union of different kinds of labor, see Stein, Lehrbuch, 24.

2 Compare Ad. Müller, Elemente der Staatskunst, III, 1809. Fr. List, System der polit. Ekonomie, 222 ff., 409 ff. Wakefield, in his edition of Adam Smith, distinguishes two degrees of coöperation, simple and complex. In the case of simple labor, the same sort of work is performed at the same time and place by several individuals, as, for instance, by a lot of hod-carriers in building. In the other case, there are different kinds of work performed at different times and places, but all intended for the one greater end. Agri.