, and it
seldom results in the subversion or entire suppression of a standpoint
once accepted. A distinction is still habitually made between industrial
and non-industrial occupations; and this modern distinction is a
transmuted form of the barbarian distinction between exploit and
drudgery. Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and
public merrymaking, are felt, in the popular apprehension, to differ
intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating the
material means of life. The precise line of demarcation is not the same
as it was in the early barbarian scheme, but the broad distinction has
not fallen into disuse.

The tacit, common-sense distinction to-day is, in effect, that any
effort is to be accounted industrial only so far as its ultimate purpose
is the utilisation of non-human things. The coercive utilisation of man
by man is not felt to be an industrial function; but all effort directed
to enhance human life by taking advantage of the non-human environment
is classed together as industrial activity. By the economists who have
best retained and adapted the classical tradition, man's "power over
nature" is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of industrial
productivity. This industrial power over nature is taken to include
man's power over the life of the beasts and over all the elemental
forces. A line is in this way drawn between mankind and brute creation.

In other times and among men imbued with a different body of
preconceptions this line is not drawn precisely as we draw it to-day.
In the savage or the barbarian scheme of life it is drawn in a different
place and in another way. In all communities under the barbarian
culture there is an alert and pervading sense of antithesis between
two comprehensive groups of phenomena, in one of which barbarian
man includes himself, and in the other, his victual. There is a felt
antithesis between economic and non-economic phenomena, but it is not
conceived in the modern fashion; it lies not between man and brute
creation, but between animate and inert things.

It may be an excess of caution at this day to explain that the barbarian
notion which it is here intended to convey by the term "animate" is not
the same as would be conveyed by the word "living". The term does not
cover all living things, and it does cover a great many others. Such
a striking natural phenomenon as a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are
recognised as "an