A NUT FOR “THE SUBDIVISION OF LABOUR.”
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.
One of their majesties would have insisted on the petals, and the other been equally imperative regarding the stamina: they'd have pushed their claims with all the weight of their influence, and there would have been soon little vestige of a nosegay between them.