ard experimenting on poisons was the only
individual in a whole territory interrogating nature; and where later,
a few score of alchemists and astrologers only were engaged in examining
the structure of substances, or the movement of planets, today thousands
of men in every civilised community are labouring to unravel the
mysteries of nature, and the practical chemist, the physician, the
anatomist, the engineer, the astronomer, the mathematician, the
electrician, form a mighty and always increasingly important army of
male labourers. Where once an isolated bard supplied a nation with its
literatures, or where later a few thousand priests and men of letters
wrote and transcribed for the few to read, today literature gives labour
to a multitude almost as countless as a swarm of locusts. From the
penny-a-liner to the artist and thinker, the demand for their labour
continually increases. Where one town-crier with stout legs and lusty
lungs was once all-sufficient to spread the town and country news, a
score of men now sit daily pen in hand, preparing the columns of the
morning's paper, and far into the night a hundred compositors are
engaged in a labour which requires a higher culture of brain and finger
than most ancient kings and rulers possessed. Even in the labours of
war, the most brutal and primitive of the occupations lingering on into
civilised life from the savage state, the new demand for labour of an
intellectual kind is enormous. The invention, construction, and working
of one Krupp gun, though its mere discharge hardly demands more crude
muscular exertion than a savage expends in throwing his boomerang, yet
represents an infinitude of intellectual care and thought, far greater
than that which went to the shaping of all the weapons of a primitive
army. Above all, in the domain of politics and government, where once a
king or queen, aided by a handful of councillors, was alone practically
concerned in the labours of national guidance or legislation; today,
owing to the rapid means of intercommunication, printing, and the
consequent diffusion of political and social information throughout a
territory, it has become possible, for the first time, for all adults
in a large community to keep themselves closely informed on all national
affairs; and in every highly-civilised state the ordinary male has been
almost compelled to take his share, however small, in the duties and
labours of legislation and government. Thus the