Still, in its most acute form, it may
be called a modern problem.)

Yet it is only upon one, and a comparatively small, section of the
males of the modern civilised world that these changes in the material
conditions of life have told in such fashion as to take all useful
occupation from them and render them wholly or partly worthless to
society. If the modern man's field of labour has contracted at one end
(the physical), at the other (the intellectual) it has immeasurably
expanded! If machinery and the command of inanimate motor-forces
have rendered of comparatively little value the male's mere physical
motor-power, the demand upon his intellectual faculties, the call
for the expenditure of nervous energy, and the exercise of delicate
manipulative skill in the labour of human life, have immeasurably
increased.

In a million new directions forms of honoured and remunerative social
labour are opening up before the feet of the modern man, which his
ancestors never dreamed of; and day by day they yet increase in
numbers and importance. The steamship, the hydraulic lift, the patent
road-maker, the railway-train, the electric tram-car, the steam-driven
mill, the Maxim gun and the torpedo boat, once made, may perform their
labours with the guidance and assistance of comparatively few hands; but
a whole army of men of science, engineers, clerks, and highly-trained
workmen is necessary for their invention, construction, and maintenance.
In the domains of art, of science, of literature, and above all in the
field of politics and government, an almost infinite extension has taken
place in the fields of male labour. Where in primitive times woman was
often the only builder, and patterns she daubed on her hut walls or
traced on her earthen vessels the only attempts at domestic art; and
where later but an individual here and there was required to design
a king's palace or a god's temple or to ornament it with statues or
paintings, today a mighty army of men, a million strong, is employed in
producing plastic art alone, both high and low, from the traceries on
wall-paper and the illustrations in penny journals, to the production
of the pictures and statues which adorn the national collections, and
a mighty new field of toil has opened before the anciently hunting and
fighting male. Where once one ancient witch-doctress may have been the
only creature in a whole district who studied the nature of herbs and
earths, or a solitary wiz