But now, no sooner does this division of employments obtain in society, than our pyramid begins to form. The man of manual labour rests still at the basis; he of superior skill, the artist, or the intellectual workman, rises permanently above him. The more minute this division of labour, the more simple and mechanical becomes the labour of the artisan; the education he receives from his employment becomes more and more limited; he is wanted for so little; he is esteemed, and, if other circumstances permit, remunerated accordingly. "Although," says the celebrated economist, J. B. Say, "a man who performs one operation all his life comes to execute it better and more rapidly than any other man, yet at the same time he grows less capable of every other occupation, physical and moral; his other faculties are extinguished, and there results a degradation to the human being considered individually. It is a sad account to give of one's-self to have accomplished nothing but the eighteenth part of a pin.... In conclusion, it may be said that the separation of labours is a skilful employment of the force of man--that it increases prodigiously the products of society--but it destroys something of the capacity of the individual man." That this inevitable division and subdivision of labour gives rise to, and renders permanent, the distinction of classes in a community, is clear enough. But we do not agree with M. Say, and other economists, in representing that minute subdivision of labour which accompanies a very advanced state of civilisation, as peculiarly injurious to the workman. That degradation of the artisan, which might ensue from the monotony and triviality of his employment, is counteracted by that variety of interests which spring up in a civilised community. This eighteenth part of a pin is not all that educates or engages his mind. He is not a solitary workman. His file and his wire are not his sole companions. He has the gossip of his neighbourhood, the politics of his parish, of his town, of his country--whatever fills the columns of a newspaper, or gives topic of conversation to a populous city--he has, at least, all this for intellectual food. The man of handicraft is educated by the city he lives in, not by his handicraft; and the humblest artisan feels the influence of that higher civilisation from which he seems at first to be entirely shut out. Hodge the countryman, who can sow, and plough, and reap; who understands hedging and ditching, and the management of sheep; who is accomplished in all agricultural labours, ought to be, if his daily avocations alone decided the matter, infinitely superior to the village cobbler, who travels only from the sole to the upper leather, and who squats stitching all day long. But the cobbler is generally the more knowing, and certainly the more talkative man. Hodge himself is the first to recognise it; for he listens to him at the ale-house, which sometimes