if the population can be divided into plutocrats and proletariate? Moreover, the very nature of economic production seems to imply an opposition between social progress and individual wellbeing. For the former, in demanding the greatest possible amount of produce, requires an excessive and increasing specialisation of labour. Each worker must perform that operation only to which he has been specially trained, or which he can do best. And in this way industrialism tends to occupy the greater part of the waking hours of an increasing proportion of human lives in the repetition of a short series of mechanical movements which call out a bare minimum of the faculties of the worker, dwarf his nature, and reduce his life to a mere succession of the same monotonous sensation.[174] In spite, therefore, of immense improvements in the general conditions of wellbeing, it is still difficult to say that the happiness of the average human life has been much increased by the march of industrial progress. [Sidenote: and political.] A more hopeful view may, perhaps, be taken of the effect of political progress. The increase of popular government gratifies the desire for power, and, in some cases, even tends to a more efficient management of affairs. Still more important in its effect on happiness is the greater security for life and property which the gradual consolidation of political control has brought about. It would seem, too, that the harsher features of the struggle by which this advance takes place have been modified; and that the war of politics has abated in fury more than the war of trade. On the whole, therefore, the tendency of modern political rule appears to be towards an almost unmixed gain in respect of happiness,--by the security it affords for life and property, by its wide distribution of political power, and by the room it gives for individual freedom. Yet the last of these results--in the _laissez-faire_ system of industrialism to which it has led, and which, in spite of many modifications, is still in the ascendant--has effects of a more doubtful character. This mere reference to one or two of the leading features of progress would not be sufficient to support a thesis either as to its beneficial or baneful tendency. But evidence enough has been led to show that the effects on pleasure of individual and social development are of a mixed kind,--that culture and civilisation have neither the tendency to misery which Hartmann follows Rousseau in attributing to them,[175] nor, on the other hand, that steady correspondence with increasing pleasure which would be required to establish the position of evolutionist hedonism. [Sidenote: Necessity of choosing between evolutionism and hedonism.]