Human work being an organic process, it must of course specialise. Those who cry out against specialisation and seek to uphold a mythical “all-around man” are ignorant of the nature of social functions. The very first condition of organic life is division of labour, and as the organism develops the complexity of that division develops with it. The strength and efficiency of any organism depends not so much on its bulk and weight as on the prompt and perfect co-ordination of its parts.

This is a truism in military organisation, which is an old game with us, but we do not seem to understand it in industrial organisation, which is a new one. In the military body we have long ago learned to consider the whole before the part and the purpose of that whole as a measure of action for each part, but in the economic body we are yet a mob of savages. The ego concept is perforce set aside in military life; in economic life it still rules. In military ethics one never hears that “self-preservation is the first law of nature”; no soldier thinks of justifying rank cowardice and insubordination with the plea that “a man must live!” Neither is there any objection to the widest specialisation, to careful grading of officers, to the complete separation of surgeon and chaplain, engineer and commissary. No one seeks to maintain the “all-around man” in the army.

Military organisation is our oldest and so best developed form. Its purpose is crude and easy of perception; its impulses are inherent in the masculine nature; its methods, like those of old-established churches, appeal to the primitive instincts. The gorgeous ritual of military form has much to do with our allegiance to it. But in the now far more important co-ordination of industrial forces no such progress is made. In place of splendid uniforms we have the soiled and soul-depressing garments of our miscellaneous workers. Instead of “esprit du corps” we have the beautiful spirit of “every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.”

Instead of “glory” we have before us only “booty”; instead of “honour” we have the incessant struggle of the civil law to check the ceaseless manoeuvring of dishonesty. And in place of one resistless organisation we have at best the progress of the trades-unions and at worst those guerilla bands, the small, fierce hordes of warring trusts, fighting each other and preying on all of us.

The inevitable increase of specialisation has gone on, but under the disadvantage of this crude position it has carried with it a wholly unnecessary burden of evil. Specialisation in labour starts at the very beginning of our growth, at first being only an arrangement of whole men, each man making a whole thing.

To this stage of social evolution some are now wishing to revert—a sad waste of wishing! We might as well wish to be invertebrates again as to sigh for past periods of social development.

The lower the creature the less its organic specialisation. There are some so indeterminate and undivided that they do not know their heads from their tails; cut them in two and they promptly produce a new head and a new tail and go about their business as before. This beast is a fine example for the “all-around man.”

The higher the creature the more specialised. The more worthily a part fulfils one function the less worthily it can fulfil others. When the paw becomes a hand it ceases to be a paw. The more fit the hand for a hand’s use the less fit for a foot’s use. It would in no way benefit the body to have a set of loose, interchangeable organs capable of doing a little of everything and nothing very well. An “all-around” organ would not be as valuable as any single-hearted servant that gives its one regular contribution to the body’s good.

So in the social organism, our line of progress has been from the “all-around” savage to the absolutely one-sided activity of the specialised workman who contributes his best efforts to one line of service. “To learn to do one thing and do it well” is what makes the great artist, the great scientist, the great preacher, the great mechanic, the great electrician. Social service requires the steadily increasing specialisation of its constituents.

When you want a dentist you want to find him in his office, with the accumulated skill of long study and constant practice; you do not want to wait for him to come in from the plough and wash his hands. All this we know well enough, and yet we recognise the injurious effects to the individual of the kind of specialisation we see about us, and have not yet been able to reconcile the two.

If the individual is injured there must be evil somewhere, that is quite true. No society can prosper at the expense of its constituents. If the individual is reduced in physical strength and health, in personal happiness, or in the best social usefulness by his work, the process he is engaged in must be abnormal. Now let us see whether the evils so conspicuous in the lives of our highly specialised workers to-day are inherent in their degree of specialisation, or whether they are coincident rather than consequent and due to quite other causes.

What is it that injures the man who turns a crank all day? It is an evil both of omission and commission, involving a waste of cerebral energy in compelling the attention of the human brain to a point of execution so narrow and uninteresting, and also the lack of development involved in doing nothing else. To forcibly focus the attention on a detail for a long time is a ruinous expense of nerve force, and it is this which makes the employment of children in such work so doubly damnable. To concentrate and hold attention is not natural to childhood; that is why they fail to do it and are so frequently killed and injured by their machines. Accidents to working children happen mostly toward the end of the day’s work, as they grow more unequal to the unnatural strain.

And when the child does prematurely muster all his powers and display as a child the concentration of a man, he is thereby ruined for life, prematurely aged, a wasted and broken thing before he is grown. In the work of the Chicago Settlements a case was found where an honest, industrious man of thirty broke down and died, and the doctor’s verdict was that he died of old age; every part of him was used up by excessive labour from early childhood. It is bad enough for the adult. The paralysing effects of twelve hours’ repetition of some one small mechanical effort is painfully clear to any observer.

Does it follow, therefore, that we must discontinue the machine and go back to the period where “one man makes one thing,” the ideal of our well-meaning reversionists? Is it so much more noble for one man to make one canoe than for a thousand men to make an ocean steamer? Must we go without the ocean steamer and go back to the canoe period of civilisation because it is better to be an all-around savage than a man who makes rivets by machinery? Is there no way of saving the individual life of the rivet-maker without “giving up the ship”?

Assuredly there is. The evil effects of this complex, modern work do not lie in its complexity, or its delicate mechanical accuracy, but may be traced straight to the door of our existing economic fallacies and errors; to the overwork and underpay and general evil conditions based on those errors.

Approach the blissful savage making his own canoe and hire him at a minimum wage to make canoes for you all day and every day for the weary years of a short, worn-out life; the fact that he made a whole thing would not suffice to make him happy or develop that so desirable globularity. If the riveter took the same interest in his steamer that the savage did in his canoe, and worked no longer at his riveting than the savage at his cutting and sewing, his fractional production of an enormous common engine for common good would give him more pleasure than the savage’s unitary production of a tiny private engine for private good.

The natural conditions of social specialisation are these: In proportion to the degree of specialisation the time of work should be shortened and the interest of the worker extended.

It does not hurt the human mind—a strong, healthy, well-developed mind—to make rivets for a little while.

“Ah, but,” you will reply, “if the riveter only worked a little while he could not earn enough to live on.”

Here is where our economic fallacies come in. The man with the machine can turn out as many rivets in an hour as the man working by hand could in a day. Therefore his hour’s work is equal to what was a day’s work. That is the value of machinery. It gives more wealth for less effort, the maximum product with the minimum expense of nerve force and of time. Every step of our elaborate mechanical specialisation should have relieved the worker of more and more hours of labour and set that much time and strength free for other use.

The infinite multiplication of wealth by machinery meets its own problem of overspecialisation. Here are a hundred men, making cloth alone on a hundred hand looms, and earning thereby a dollar a day each—one hundred dollars. Here are these hundred men organised, specialised; ten of them run machine looms, turning out cloth tenfold, equal to a thousand dollars a day. Other ten, specialised, run the mill and its business; twenty of them with machines earning ten times what the hundred did, or forty of them working half a day each, or eighty of them working quarter of a day.

The earning power of the man plus the machine is so enormously multiplied that he is richly able to take the needed rest and variety of exercise which will enable him to do his wearing work without injury, and at the same time give society the benefit of the extreme specialisation.

“But—but,” cries the offended reader, “the man does not own the machine! he did own the loom. It takes capital to run a mill, and capital has to be paid!”

The question of property rights comes in later, in Chapter XV. This is all a question of men, of human beings, and how they best work together, doing the most for Society with the least injury to themselves. This chapter is not taking up the question of capital nor of property, but simply seeking to show that specialisation, as such, need not injure the worker, because the very nature of specialisation is to reduce man’s work. Why we have also made it reduce man’s pay is not so easily explained. That the greatest multiplier of wealth should impoverish the producer surely indicates some defect in our methods.

Specialisation perfects and multiplies production, and reduces effort. This inevitably increases wealth and leisure. If the wealth and leisure are monopolised in one quarter and the contributory specialist is sacrificed in the process, it does not prove the specialisation to be wrong, but the distribution of result; and that we will take up in the chapter on Distribution. Meanwhile the law of specialisation goes on and gives us social servants more and more exquisitely adapted to some one function. With normal economic conditions they would take full share in the resultant social gain, and be quite free to combat the possible ill effects of their position.

The shortening of hours allows of another quite simple and natural effect. Where work is so broad and general as to require a whole man’s whole working time, as of the teacher, artist, or large manager in any industry, it is thereby so interesting that a man can give his whole time to it without belittling effects. (“Whole working time” need not be more than four to six hours, even at our stage of mechanical evolution.)

Where work is so narrow and fractional as not to interest a man for his whole time, it is therefore so specialised that he need not give his whole time to it.

The simple turning of a crank for an hour wearies the brain equal to larger effort, but does not forbid that brain some other labour. If the specialty is one of exquisite subtlety of particular skill, as with those girls in the Treasury who test banknotes by touch, no other labour should be entered upon which would tend to blur or weaken that skill, only rest and recreation.

A properly educated human creature, in full touch with the whole great working world, can support his or her own concentrated effort by virtue of conscious connection with the whole, can see the ship in the rivet. Well nourished socially, keenly alive to our gain, our progress, and to the relative value of his own department of service and his own share in it, not looking at the work as his, done for his pay, but as ours and done for our benefit, the normal human being can not only sustain extreme specialisation, but glory in it.

Our especial cruelty in this regard is that we condemn to exhausting hours of extreme specialisation the very people least fitted to bear it, the ill-nourished physically and socially, the uneducated, the dull and dark of mind. Or, conversely, we deprive our extremely specialised social servants of exactly those things by which alone they can sustain the demands of that service.

A man with widespread, active social consciousness, in full contact and exchange with all parts of the great body to which he belongs, will not suffer from its concentrated and exclusive service, but will take glad part in forming an “all-round” Society.

One would think that specialisation in labour ought to have forced upon every observer long ages since the fact that human work is something done for others. The shepherd and fisherman, first stage above savagery, may live upon the fruit of their labours; and so, in part, may the farmer, first stage of really civilised growth. They exchange the surplus, but they do directly consume part of what passes through their hands.

But the specialised workman, whether he carry a spade or a hod, swing an axe or hold a lever, is so obviously doing it for thousands of unknown other people that his position under the ego concept becomes miraculously difficult. He holds it, though, and, what is perhaps even more miraculous, so do we! So does the general consumer, whose life is maintained by the service of thousands of fellow beings,—who is housed by them, clothed by them, carried by them, guarded by them, taught by them,—still have the incredible face to maintain that these people who keep him alive are working for themselves!

Harder than steel must be the cell walls of the brain that can live in such complex social relation as ours to-day and maintain that he or anyone else “takes care of himself.” The error dates back in essence to the ego concept; but it becomes a thousand-fold more erroneous when first the machine, and then the use of “natural forces” applied to machinery, made possible our vast increase in specialisation.

That one man must give his life to the art of weaving did not so narrow his mental area, or so cut him off from appreciation of other branches of human work, as this later development where a man wears out two sets of oak planks in one spot, standing still all his life, making nails! It seems “a far cry” from the fractional construction of nails to the social consciousness, and yet, in the true order of industrial development, it brings it nearer. The more extreme the specialisation the more extreme the interdependence, and that universal interdependence is the condition which calls for, and which develops, social consciousness.

In the true order—but that order has been grievously interfered with by our own mistakes. Acting under the ego concept, and the system of competition which rests upon it, the increasing specialisation which is so normal a condition of social growth has been made to carry increasing evil consequences to the specialised worker. A just and rational position on the part of Society! As fast as its members specialise in compliance with the demands of social benefit, so fast does the benefited society stunt and degrade its benefactors!

That there has been improvement in the rank and file of society is not denied, but it is due to our partial and grudging distribution of the social good along normal lines of public provision, such as free schools and libraries, and not to our idiotic ideas of individual work and pay.

Where there is no such public provision our economic concepts act to crush and degrade the worker. That increasing specialisation with its mechanical adjuncts, which should make it possible for a man to discharge his social obligations in an hour and then be free to contribute to progress by larger growth, we have taken advantage of to compel an amount and grade of labour alike ruinous to the individual in his immediate sacrifice and to the society composed of such sacrificed individuals. Men dying of thirst have been known to bite madly into their own flesh and suck the blood, but for a prosperous, growing society, rich, powerful, safe, intelligent, to make a steady diet of its own meat, is unreasonable.

“The social sacrifice” is a very real and noble thing. It sometimes requires the lives of some of its members to preserve the life of the whole body. This sacrifice is always cheerfully made in war. It also requires the surrender of individual freedom of action to that complex interaction and unswerving duty which makes up the social service. But this sacrifice is more than compensated by the advantages given the individual in the life of the whole. A member of a big, complex society has not only a far better and happier personal life than his freely individual savage ancestor, but he has also share in the large, glorious, common life of that society.

That is, he should have these things. As it is—owing to our antediluvian errors—he has to make the sacrifice, and in return he is reduced to an individual life far less gratifying than that of a healthy savage, yet knows no more of the splendid social consciousness belonging to his position than if he were that savage still.

There is one feature in social specialisation so prominent and so important as to call for more detailed explanation. This is the relation of what we call “unskilled labour” to social evolution. Our ideas of justice in payment, of the necessary “cheapness” of certain low grades of work, our patient tenderness or impatient contempt for this immense class of humanity, rest on the assumption that human beings are widely unequal in ability; that most of them are of this low and cheap order, and that social progress lies in the advance of superior individuals, assisted in a humble way by the inferior.

For these we must “furnish employment” of a simple character suited to their powers, and pay them with a modesty equal to their other limitations. Because there are so many of them, their competition for the humble tasks allotted keeps the price of unskilled labour very low indeed. Through organisation they have forced the price up a little, but most of us consider this as unjustifiable in strict economic law.

If it is shown that low wages for low labour keeps that labour always low, and indeed makes it lower; that out of the impoverished environment we inevitably breed defectives and degenerates, diseases and crimes; and that farther, because a hard and unfavourable environment promotes fecundity, therefore this low rate of wages tends to increase the birth rate of the lowest people, thus making a vicious circle of social stagnation and deterioration—if these things are proved to us, we say it cannot be helped—it is a condition of human nature. These inferior people are the bulk of humanity; they cannot do high-grade labour; it would not be fair to pay the plentiful “cheap labour” as much as the scarce and therefore more expensive kind, so there you are! As a way of escape from this position “the brotherhood of man” tries to uplift the lowly, but the majority do not accept this brotherhood theory. Or they say, “Brother or not, these are such hopelessly inferior brothers that we will not consent to any levelling which would reduce us to their grade, and they cannot be raised to ours.”

Now here is the true position. “Unskilled labour” is a product of social evolution. Among savages there is no unskilled labour. Each man must be skilled in several lines to keep himself alive. In his pre-social condition of individualism, his life depending immediately upon his own exertions, he necessarily develops skill in his essential activities. No heavy-eyed, slow-witted, hod-carrying grade of efficiency could maintain itself in a status of individual savagery. The “man with the hoe” comes later—much later. He is produced, developed, maintained, by a highly differentiated society. The nobleman evolves the serf—they are parts of one fighting organisation. The mill-owner and his “hands” are part of one working organisation.

The individual savage is swift, alert, vigorous, sentinelled by the keenest of senses, served by prompt and varied abilities of many sorts. But his action, though more perfect, is on a lower grade in industrial evolution. He would not be capable, though under never so dreaded penalties, of working, his life long, in one fractional line of social service.

The more society develops the more widely differentiated become its labours. In its differentiation there comes to be an immense proportion of very simple things to do; simple because they are tiny parts of something extremely complex. The savage’s life is anything but “simple.” His elaborate and exciting monologue requires of him the whole gamut of individual capacity in constant shock and change. But in the peace and power of a great civilisation, in the organic spread of social functions, there are more and more kinds of labour which are so infinitely simplified that a dolt can do them.

It does not follow that a dolt must do them! It does not follow that we should hunt out all our inferior persons to do these unelevating things, and so remain inferior. It does not follow that we should keep the inferior person so long at his unelevating task as to further lower his inferiority; that we should pay him so little as to prevent any development from outside advantages; or that, worst of all, we should so condemn his children to their subminimum share of his “minimum wage” as to make them lower yet.

In our ignorance of the nature of society, and the nature of work; in our cheerful blindness to the lessons of history; with our poor choked and twisted brains, so crammed with the follies of our ancestors, and so weakened by what we have called education that they cannot think; we have taken for granted that society had to have about so much “unskilled labour” to provide for, and could only provide for it by “furnishing employment” suited to its powers.

If we can once recognise the facts in the case, we will change our behaviour fast enough. Observe the line of social growth. Here is a nascent society of a vague group of savages, feebly held together by the pressure of a common danger; feebly drawn together by the attraction of a common need. So held and drawn the same forces which grouped the cells and started the growth of physical organisms worked upon them, and they began to differentiate in function.

Follow one line of work, such as the clothing of society. The individual savage took a skin off another animal and put it on himself; that was the beginning. It required in him, and in his squaw, the highly exciting and agreeable exercise of the rudiments of many trades. He hunted, fought, killed, and skinned the beast. She tanned and dressed, cut and sewed, with elaborate decoration. All very interesting.

Now comes the evolution of that industry on inevitable lines. First, the division of trades; one hunted, another tanned, another sewed, and so on. Then, as society increased, as skill increased, as productivity increased, as commerce increased, we find these trades increasing in importance, in bulk, and in complexity; until now we have one garment going through a thousand hands between the wool or cotton fibre, and the wearer of the dress.

In this process, a perfectly healthy social process, the fractional details of the work become extremely small and simple, and our mechanical ingenuity has made them smaller and simpler yet; till no more skill or judgment is required than a factory child or poor dull sweated “garment worker” can apply.

In these familiar facts see the real principle involved. Social progress has so differentiated labour as to make infinitely short, easy, and simple to a thousand co-workers what was once long, difficult, and complicated for one. These beneficently simple processes make possible the use of “unskilled labour”; make it possible for society to maintain in its service individual working capacity lower than that of a savage, lower almost than the beast.

But here is our great error. Unskilled labour does not require the unskilled labourer. Unskilled labour can be performed equally well by skilled labourers of the highest sort, as mere play, as rest from these more exacting functions. In proportion to its simplicity and ease, its extreme mechanical perfection of adjustment, is, or should be, the saving of time involved.

Here is a world, all shod, at the expense of a large amount of individual labour, every man making his own shoes. Here is a world, all shod, at far less expense of labour, when the shoemaker gives his specialised skill to the business. Here is the world, all shod, at infinitely less expense of labour; when the shoe manufactory, with specialised labour and machinery, produces a thousand-fold more swiftly and easily; and a developed commerce distributes around the world. Now, if the shoes of the world are made socially, with a thousandth part the time and labour required to make them individually, how does it happen that the makers of shoes are working harder and longer than ever? Save indeed as the trades-union, in ceaseless and costly combat, has in some degree shortened the time and raised the wages.

It is because of our familiar group of delusions in economics. It is because we so wholly fail to see the organic nature of the process, and what is really the line of social advantage in it. We see the heavy, awkward, dirty, ignorant men digging in our streets, and say, “Poor fellows! Such as they can do no other work! Stern nature has made them inferior, and it is fortunate for them that there is this plain, simple work, which they are able to do.”

What we do not see is that the plain, simple work is part of a highly complex social process. Your nimble savage has no ditch to dig; no road to build; no sewer to clean. This is social service; not of the lowest, but of the highest. The more advanced the society, the more simplified the minute subdivisions of its great and complex processes. Your nimble savage does not have to do one thing, one fraction of a fraction of a thing, for twelve hours a day—or ten—or even eight. If he did—if we did—we who look over the fence at the rude gnomes who labour in the trenches in our vivisected city to-day—we should become as they.

Unskilled labour is high social service, and social sacrifice. It is not so interesting and developing to the individual as the activities of savagery, but it is more essential to the country’s good, to the power and peace of the world. This noble service could be rendered without its present awful penalty. I do not speak of its low wages, but of its heavy punishment.

Here is work done for the service of humanity; not for any low and primitive service either, but to maintain our highest social grade of development. This work, subtle, elaborate, important, only simple in its extreme subdivision, we have chosen in our ignorance to consider “low.” The people who do it we first compelled by force; we now compel on pain of starvation; they are “low” too, and cannot help themselves.

When we understand the real grades of labour, we shall see this to be of the highest, and as such, to have its limits and dangers. Such highly specialised work cannot be followed for long hours, that is a cruel injury; and never needs to be followed for long hours, because the very law of its development is the saving of time and energy. Society, as a whole, loses the major part of the advantage of its specialised development, by ruthlessly degrading and defrauding the very functionary through whom that development is attained.