Lastly, a phaenomenon universal in all societies, and constantly
assuming a wider extension as they advance in their progress, is the
co-operation of mankind one with another, by the division of employments
and interchange of commodities and services; a communion which extends
to nations as well as individuals. The economic importance of this
spontaneous organization of mankind as joint workers with and for one
another, has often been illustrated. Its moral effects, in connecting
them by their interests, and as a more remote consequence, by their
sympathies, are equally salutary. But there are some things to be said
on the other side. The increasing specialisation of all employments; the
division of mankind into innumerable small fractions, each engrossed by
an extremely minute fragment of the business of society, is not without
inconveniences, as well moral as intellectual, which, if they could not
be remedied, would be a serious abatement from the benefits of advanced
civilization. The interests of the whole--the bearings of things on the
ends of the social union--are less and less present to the minds of men
who have so contracted a sphere of activity. The insignificant detail
which forms their whole occupation--the infinitely minute wheel they
help to turn in the machinery of society--does not arouse or gratify any
feeling of public spirit, or unity with their fellow-men. Their work is
a mere tribute to physical necessity, not the glad performance of a
social office. This lowering effect of the extreme division of labour
tells most of all on those who are set up as the lights and teachers of
the rest. A man's mind is as fatally narrowed, and his feelings towards
the great ends of humanity as miserably stunted, by giving all his
thoughts to the classification of a few insects or the resolution of a
few equations, as to sharpening the points or putting on the heads of
pins. The "dispersive speciality" of the present race of scientific men,
who, unlike their predecessors, have a positive aversion to enlarged