existence at all; and the question remains whether any sort of existence
is better than none.

In the case of a nation the process of specialization has not, for
obvious reasons, gone nearly so far. Every country does a certain amount
of farming and of seafaring (if it has a seaboard), and of
manufacturing. But the tendency has been towards increasing
specialization, and the last results of specialization, if carried to
its logical end, are not nice to forecast. "It is not pleasant," wrote a
distinguished statistician, "to contemplate England as one vast factory,
an enlarged Manchester, manufacturing in semi-darkness, continual uproar
and at an intense pressure for the rest of the world. Nor would the
continent of America, divided into square, numbered fields, and
cultivated from a central station by electricity, be an ennobling
spectacle."[7]

It need not be said that the horrible consequences of specialization
depicted by Dr. Bowley need not necessarily have happened, even if its
effects has been given free play. But the interesting point about his
picture, at the present moment, is the fact that it was drawn from the
purely economic and social point of view. He questioned whether it was
really to the advantage of a nation, regarding only its own comfort and
well-being, to allow specialization to go beyond a certain point. It
had already arrived at a point at which land was going out of
cultivation in England, and was being more and more regarded as a park,
pleasure ground and sporting place for people who made, or whose
forbears had made, fortunes out of commerce and finance, and less and
less as a means for supplying food for our workers, and raw material for
our industries. The country workers were going to the new countries that
our capital was opening up, or into the towns to learn industrial