cognition that
men are not all alike, that some have one gift and some another, and
that it is to the advantage of society to let each use his own gift in
the public service. Among primitive peoples there has indeed often been
a belief that men are compensated for physical weakness and disability
by peculiar excellence in some sphere of their own. Hephaestos among the
Greek gods was lame: so he becomes a blacksmith and uses his arms. Homer
is blind: so instead of fighting he sings of war. They would not go so
far as to maintain that all lame men must be good blacksmiths or all
blind men good poets: but at least they recognized that there was room
in the community for special types and that the blacksmith and the poet
were as useful as the ordinary run of cultivators and fighting men. The
Greek word for craftsman--[Greek: demiourgos]--'worker for the people,'
shows how the Greeks felt on this point. To them poetry and
craftsmanship were as much honourable occupations or, as we should say,
professional activities as fighting and tilling. Whether Homer took to
poetry because he could not fight or because he had an overwhelming
poetic gift, he had justified his place in the community.

Specialization is the foundation of all craftsmanship and therefore the
source of all industrial progress. We recognize this, of course, in
common speech. 'Practice makes perfect,' 'Genius is an infinite capacity
for taking pains,' are only different ways of saying that it is not
enough to be 'ready' and 'observant', but that continued activity and
concentration are necessary. A perfect industrial community would not be
a community where everybody was doing the same thing: nor would it be a
community where every one was doing just what he liked at the moment: it
would be a community where every one was putting all his strength into
the work which he was by nature best qualified to do--where, in the
words of Kipling:

No one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of Things as They Are.

Progress in industry, then, on this side, consists in increasing
specialization and in the perfection of the relationship between the
workman and his work. Man in this world is destined to labour, and
labour is often described as the curse of Adam. But in reality, as every
one knows who has tried it, or observed the ha