ircumstances of their early training been
different, they might have followed with success and pleasure a natural
bent of mind tending in a wholly opposite direction.

This miscarriage of vocation is one of the greatest causes of individual
misery in this world that exists; but its pernicious effects go far
beyond mere personal unhappiness: they exercise the most baneful
influence upon society at large, upon the progress of nations, and upon
the development of the human race. One of the advantages of the division
of labour which is most emphasized by political economists is that it
offers a fair field for personal adaptation. People select the
particular employment for which they are most fitted, and in this way
everybody in the community is engaged in doing the best and most useful
work of which he is capable.

It is a fine theory. Perhaps in olden times, before the introduction of
education systems, it may have worked well in regard to most trades and
industries. A man had then at least some opportunity of developing a
natural bent. He was not taken by the State almost from infancy, crammed
with useless knowledge, and totally unfitted for any employment within
his reach. The object was not to educate him above his station and then
make a clerk of him, or drive him into the lower branches of the Civil
Service. A bright youth was apprenticed by his father to some trade for
which he may have shown some predisposition.

Of course, mistakes were often made through the stupidity of parents or
from some other cause. There are many such examples to be met with in
the biographies of men who attained eminence in wholly different
callings from those into which they were forced in their youth.

Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus, and who first conceived the
generally-accepted theory as to the cause of sun-spots, was brought up
by his father to be a musician. In spite of his predilection for
astronomy, he continued to earn his bread by playing the oboe, until he
was promoted from being a performer in the Pump Room at Bath to the
position of Astronomer Royal.

Faraday was apprenticed by his father to a bookbinder, and he remained
in this distasteful employment until he was twenty-two. It was quite by
accident that somebody more intelligent than Michael Faraday's pastors
and masters discovered that the youth had a great natural love of
studying science, and sent him to hear a course of lectures delivered
by Sir Humphry