with men of science. Watt and Rennie were friends
with Professor Robinson; Brindley, the road-maker, despite his
fourteen-pence-a-day wages, enjoyed intercourse with educated men, and
thus developed his remarkable engineering faculties; the son of a
well-to-do family could "idle" at a wheelwright's shop, so as to become
later on a Smeaton or a Stephenson.

We have changed all that. Under the pretext of division of labor, we
have sharply separated the brain worker from the manual worker. The
masses of the workmen do not receive more scientific education than
their grandfathers did; but they have been deprived of the education of
even the small workshop, while their boys and girls are driven into a
mine or a factory from the age of thirteen, and there they soon forget
the little they may have learned at school. As to the men of science,
they despise manual labor. How few of them would be able to make a
telescope, or even a plainer instrument? Most of them are not capable
of even designing a scientific instrument, and when they have given a
vague suggestion to the instrument-maker they leave it with him to
invent the apparatus they need. Nay, they have raised the contempt of
manual labor to the height of a theory. "The man of science," they say,
"must discover the laws of nature, the civil engineer must apply them,
and the worker must execute in steel or wood, in iron or stone, the
patterns devised by the engineer. He must work with machines invented
for him, not by him. No matter if he does not understand them and cannot
improve them: the scientific man and the scientific engineer will take
care of the progress of science and industry."

It may be objected that nevertheless there is a class of men who belong
to none of the above three divisions. When young they have been manual
workers, and some of them continue to be; but, owing to some happy
circumstances, they have succeeded in acquiring some scientific
knowledge, and thus they have combined science with handicraft. Surely
there are such men; happily enough there is a nucleus of men who have
escaped the so-much-advocated specialization of labor, and it is
precisely to them that industry owes its chief recent inventions. But in
old Europe at least, they are the exceptions; they are the
irregulars--the Cossacks who have broken the ranks and pierced the
screens so carefully erected between the classes. And they are so few,
in comparison with the ever-growing requirement