I forget the place, and the occasion also, but I have a kind of misty
recollection of having once, in these nutting excursions of mine, been
excessively eloquent on the subject of the advantages derivable from
division of labour.
Not a walk or condition in life is there to which it has not penetrated;
and while natural talents have become cultivated from finding their most
congenial sphere of operation, immense results have accrued in every art
and science where a higher degree of perfection has been thus attained.
Your doctor and your lawyer now-a-days select the precise portion of
your person or property they intend to operate on. The oculist and the
aurist, and the odontalgist and the pedicurist, all are suggestive of
various local sufferings, by which they bound their skill; and so, the
equity lawyer and the common-law lawyer, the special pleader and the bar
orator, have subdivided knavery, without diminishing its amount. Even in
literature, there are the heavy men who “do” the politics, and the quiet
men who do the statistics, and the rough-and-ready men, who are a
kind of servants-of-all-work, and so on. In universities, there is the
science man and the classical man, the man of simple equations and
the man of spondees. Painting has its bright colourists and its more
sombre-loving artists, and so on--the great camps of party would seem to
have given the impulse to every condition of life, and “speciality” is
the order of the day.
No sooner is a new discovery made, no matter whether in the skies above,
or the dark bowels of the earth, than an opportunity of disagreement
is sure to arise. Two, mayhap three, gentlemen, profess diversity of
opinion; followers are never lacking, let any one be fool enough to turn
leader--and straightway there comes out a new sect, with a Greek name
for a title.
It is only the other day, men began to find out that primitive rocks,
and basalt, ochre, and sandstone, had lived a long time, and must surely
know something of antiquity--if they only could tell it. The stones,
from that hour, had an unhappy time of it--men went about in gangs with
hammers and crowbars, shivering this and shattering that--picking holes
in respectable old rocks, that never had a word said against them, and
peeping into “quarts,” (*) like a policeman.
* Query “quartz.”--Devil.
Men must be quarrelsome, you'd say, if they could fight about
paving-stones--but so they did. One set would have it that the world was
all cinders, and another set insisted it was only slack--and so, they
called themselves Plutonians and Neptunians, and made great converts to
their respective opinions.
Gulliver tells us of “Big-endians” and “Little-endians,” who hated each
other like poison; and thus it is, our social condition is like a row in
an Irish fair, where one strikes somebody, and nobody thinks the other
right.
Oh! for the happy days of heretofore, when the two kings of Brentford
smelled at one nosegay. It couldn't happen now, I promise you.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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