Besides, it is not so easy to measure the time spent on a piece of work as it seems at first. Paying a laborer twice as much for two hours work as for one is as simple as twice one are two; but when you have to divide between an opera singer and her dresser, or an unskilled laborer and a doctor, you find that you cannot tell how much time you have to allow for. The dresser and the laborer are doing what any ablebodied person can do without long study or apprenticeship. The doctor has to spend six years in study and training, on top of a good general education, to qualify himself to do his work. He claims that six years of unpaid work are behind every minute of his attendance at your bedside. A skilled workman may claim in the same way that seven years of apprenticeship are behind every stroke of his hammer. The opera singer has had to spend a long time learning her parts, even when, as sometimes happens, she has never learnt to sing. Everybody acknowledges that this makes a difference; but nobody can measure exactly what the difference is, either in time or money. The same difficulty arises in attempting to compare the value of the work of a clever woman with that of a stupid one. You may think that the work of the clever woman is worth more; but when you are asked how much more in pounds, shillings, and pence you have to give it up and fall back on supply and demand, confessing that the difference cannot be measured in money. In these examples I have mixed up making things with doing services; but I must now emphasize this distinction, because thoughtless people are apt to think a brickmaker more of a producer than a clergyman. When a village carpenter makes a gate to keep cattle out of a field of wheat, he has something solid in his hand which he can claim for his own until the farmer pays him for it. But when a village boy makes a noise to keep the birds off he has nothing to shew, though the noise is just as necessary as the gate. The postman does not make anything: he only delivers letters and parcels. The policeman does not make anything; and the soldier not only does not make things: he destroys them. The doctor makes pills sometimes; but that is not his real business, which is to tell you when you ought to take pills, and what pills to take, unless indeed he has the good sense to tell you not to take them at all, and you have the good sense to believe him when he is giving you good advice instead of bad. The lawyer does not make anything substantial, nor the clergyman, nor the member of Parliament, nor the domestic servant (though she sometimes breaks things), nor the Queen or King, nor an actor. When their work is done they have nothing in hand that can be weighed or measured: nothing that the maker can keep from others until she is paid for it. They are all in service: in domestic service like the housemaid, or in commercial service like the shop assistant, or in Government service like the postman, or in State