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 there has opened before the mass of men a vast new sphere
of labour undreamed of by their ancestors. In every direction the change
which material civilisation has wrought, while it has militated against
that comparatively small section of males who have nothing to offer society
but the expenditure of their untrained muscular energy (inflicting much and
often completely unmerited suffering upon them), has immeasurably extended
the field of male labour as a whole. Never before in the history of the
earth has the man's field of remunerative toil been so wide, so
interesting, so complex, and in its results so all-important to society;
never before has the male sex, taken as a whole, been so fully and
strenuously employed.

So much is this the case, that, exactly as in the earlier conditions of
society an excessive and almost crushing amount of the most important